Peter Radcliff Oral History Transcript
Interview conducted by Harvey Schwartz
May 31, 2000
Labor Archives and Research Center, San Francisco State University
2000, revised 2015
Copyright © 2015
This oral history was conducted as part of the Labor Archives and Research Center Oral History
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Labor Archives and Research Center, SFSU
Peter Radcliff Oral History Transcript
Interviewer: Harvey Schwartz [HS]
Interviewee: Peter Radcliff [PR]
Date: May 31, 2000
Subject: Oral History for the Labor Archives - San Francisco State University
[Begin Tape 1 - Side 1]
HS: May 31st, the year 2000. I’m in San Francisco and I’m with Peter Radcliff. This
will be an oral history focused to a great degree on San Francisco State University
and its union movement.
Peter, can we do a little background, where we were born, when we were born,
where we grew up? Just a little bit.
PR: Sure. My name is Peter Radcliff and on my resume that came first. And what came
after that was born April 29th, 1932 in Istanbul, Turkey. And I always thought that
helped me get jobs because I had an academic sounding name, Radcliff, and then the next
line, an exotic birthplace, Istanbul, Turkey. I’m not only a professor. I’m a son of a
professor. My father was a professor at Robert College. But he left that position a year
after I was born. He had an MA in English Literature from Columbia University, and he
also attended Princeton Seminary. He was basically a preacher and he was teaching
English and religion courses. When all instruction in Turkey was required to be secular
and it was impossible to teach religion courses, he returned to the ministry. And so from
the age of one through the mid-fifth grade I grew up in Spokane, Washington.
Then my parents moved to San Diego. My father had a church there and I graduated
from high school in San Diego in 1950. I went to Oberlin College, ‘50 to ‘54.
University of Washington, graduate work in philosophy, ‘54 to ’58. 1 was raised
Christian, socialist, and pacifist. My father was active in church and labor affairs. He
never voted Democratic until 1948 when he felt he didn’t have luxury of voting non-
Democratic; that was the first time he voted Democratic, 1948.
HS: How come he didn’t vote for Roosevelt and so forth in the early -
PR: He was still voting for Norman Thomas.
HS: Oh, voting -
PR: Voting Socialist until ‘48.
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HS: Got it.
PR: And another big figure was Muste and the Fellowship of Reconciliation. He was a
pacifist during the Second World War. And - so I was raised in a family that was
political, that was resistant to the government in many ways. And so on. So I did have
that, that sort of -
HS: You mentioned the word “labor.” Did your dad have any contact with the labor
movement as such?
PR: In Spokane, Washington he did. He served on church/labor things. I was only in the
fourth or fifth grade. I know that he went out to a lot of meetings and so forth. I don’t
know exactly what his role was. In San Diego I recall going on FOR, Fellowship of
Reconciliation, picnics and so forth. I don’t recall that much about a labor connection in
his activities in San Diego.
While I was at Oberlin College, he did run for the school board in San Diego and he was
red-baited. They had mock photographs of him attending communist activities and so
forth. And he was sort of driven out of San Diego and while I was in college took a
church in Los Angeles. So there was that kind of political background and history.
HS: You mentioned - did you mention what he was doing in Spokane?
PR: He was a preacher. He had a church. He had a church in Spokane and then he had a
church in San Diego. And then he had a church in Los Angeles. My father had three
periods of things that he did in Turkey. He was there in the 20s as a YMCA secretary
and he was involved in relief for the Annenians and so on. I think that kind of
radicalized him. And then he had a church in Hell’s Kitchen [in New York City] and I
think that was a fonnative experience for him. He married and went back to Robert
College as a professor there, as a teacher teaching English and Religion, and then after
that preaching and my best memories of him are as a preacher. But an activist preacher.
HS: Yes. What was the town that Roberts College was in?
PR: That was in Istanbul.
HS: Oh, that - that was back Istanbul? Okay.
PR: And that’s where I was born.
HS: Do you know how he ever got there?
PR: How he got there?
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HS: To Istanbul?
PR: I think it was because of his - 1 don’t know what first got him out there. He was an
unmarried “Y” secretary in Istanbul in ‘28 or something like that. And I think he just
liked Turkey and Istanbul. And an opportunity came to go back and hold a position at
Robert College so he did that. After he retired from the active ministry, he actually went
back to Istanbul again in the 60s as the preacher at what was called the Dutch Chapel,
which was the Protestant Church in Istanbul. And they rotated. They had a Brit in and
then they’d have someone from the Netherlands and then they’d have an American for
like two-year terms, or something, the English language thing.
HS: Amazing.
PR: So he had a strong connection with Istanbul.
HS: What was his original denomination? Did you mention it?
PR: No, he came out of a very conservative one. It was Dutch Reform. What he ended up
in was the United Presbyterian Church, which was a very conservative branch of the
Presbyterian Church, later united with the more mainstream Presbyterian Church. And
his politics in the church that he ended up in didn’t really fit and I think that caused him
some difficulties throughout his life, I mean kind of putting his politics and his religion
together.
HS: Yeah. Yeah. When did he come back towards Spokane? Do you know what year
it was?
PR: I was born in ‘32 so he would have come back to Spokane in - about 1933 or ‘34. I
definitely remember the WPA workers out in front of our street and I remember people
coming around the back porch and we’d give them yard work and food and so on. In
essence, I caught the tail-end of the Depression.
HS: Okay. Why Oberlin College?
PR: I got a good scholarship there. I had an Honors Scholarship that required me to keep a
B-average and I was kind of afraid about that so I overdid it. Phi Beta Kappa and so
forth. I also was offered a board job. I didn’t quite get a full ride. I had to pay for my
room. But it was a very attractive offer, financially. And also, I think my parents
thought that it had the reputation of being a top liberal arts college -
HS: Right. Yeah, it does.
PR: - but also kind of - 1 think they thought - it was known to be a safe place for your
daughter because they had a, had a no-car rule. You couldn’t have cars at Oberlin
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College. But I think they also thought it was a safe place for their son. I must say that
after I left home, the only time I’ve been in a church is for a wedding or for a funeral, and
they - they sort of blamed Oberlin College for my -
HS: [Laughing]
PR: - ceasing to be involved in any way with the Christian faith.
HS: When you were at Oberlin, you were active in a student co-op movement. Can you
tell me how you decided to get active in that and how you move away from being -
the thinking was is you were moving away from being active in the church? Or a
participant in any way in church?
PR: Yeah, I don’t know. I actually - The Presbyterian church I belonged to had an adult
baptism and I didn’t actually join the church until I was a junior or senior in high school,
and then it was more out of a sense of duty or obligation. I just don’t think I ever really
was religious. I mean my father used to take me on his pastoral rounds and he’d come
into a house where somebody, a teenager has committed suicide or something like that
and he’d tell ‘em that it would be all for the best or God moves in mysterious ways, and I
thought why don’t they slug him. And instead they would be comforted by his remarks.
But I just don’t think I was of a religious temperament.
The two things I recall from my days as a student at Oberlin that are so relevant to
becoming involved in union work was first, I just was very resistant to authority and
being told what to do. I was one of the organizers of a student strike at Oberlin. They
had required [assemblies]. They were called required chapel, but it wasn’t religious. It
was really a required assembly and all students had to attend and you had to leave a slip
with your name on it that you had attended. And if you didn’t attend those, then things
were done to you and so on. And that just seemed ridiculous. So we had a - we had a
rally. We had flares. We were speaking in the light of these flares, urging students to
protest. And we were successful. The students who attended the assemblies turned in
unsigned attendance cards and so on, and we basically turned assembly into a voluntary
activity. And a great many people continued to go because they had good speakers.
Bertrand Russell spoke. You know, there’s no reason to require people to do that if they
didn’t chose to go or if they had a good reason for not going. So I just didn’t like the
idea of being required to go to something. And so we were able to stop that.
The first three years I was at Oberlin, I worked in one of the regular donns and I got free
board. I was actually a pots and pans boy. That was not one of the - [laughing] the
greatest staff board jobs to have. In my senior year I signed up to be a member of the
student co-op. And the deal with the student co-ops, which were well-established at
Oberlin when I was a student there, was that instead of paying the administration to feed
you, you hired your own cook and helped the cook out and you fed yourself. And the
goal was to - to do it for a lot less than you had to pay to have the university feed you in
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one of their dining houses. And for some reason each year the group that was going to
be in the co-op the next year met and they had to elect some - some officers, and for some
reason though I hadn’t been in the co-op the previous years and there had been a lot of
people that had been in the co-op for two or three years, but I was elected
[buyer/manager] - 1 think probably from my involvement in the student strike and this
and that. I don’t know.
Anyway, I was elected the buyer/manager, which meant that I had a lot of responsibilities
for stocking the place and establishing the different duty rosters and stuff like that. So it
involved quite a bit of organizing. And it was also kind of competitive because the idea
was that you would try to get the co-op through that year at a lower percentage than what
it cost to eat in the college boarding houses. So I think the previous record was fifty
seven percent, that the students would have to pay fifty seven percent of the college board
bill to eat at the co-op, and I think I hit fifty-three [percent in my year as a
buyer/manager.]
I was doing blindfold tests. We were buying these dairy cows that they couldn’t sell for
meat because the fat was so yellow and so on, and people complained about the color of
the fat. And we did blindfold tests on that. And we used - mixed powered milk with
whole milk and we did blindfold tests on that because people complained about that. I
don’t know, I really got into the idea. We were going to do it ourselves and we were
going to do it a whole lot cheaper. At that point I think I set a - there was a competitive
edge there - I set a percentage record. Our people were [paying] fifty- three percent of
the cost at a college dining hall, so - that was - a start with organizing, and instead of
having others do it, just do it yourself and do it better and do it cheaper and so on.
HS: So already as a kid you’ve picked up on two long traditions in American history on
the labor side, the co-op movement and the strike idea.
PR: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I did - the other thing, then, generally you hear about faculty
members that refused to sign the loyalty oath, but it may not have been realized by a lot
of people, but they were requiring graduate students to sign the loyalty oath, too, because
if you were a teaching assistant. Not if you’re just a graduate student and you weren’t
actually teaching, but if you were teaching and you were in an institution that required the
loyalty oath, then you had to - to sign it.
At the University of Washington there’d been a lot of controversy about that. There had
been refusers there that had lost their jobs. A guy named Scoop Phillips, who then
ended up as a sign painter here in San Francisco and so on, but there’ve been other people
on the left, Melvin Rader, who was kind of a radical faculty member who said, well,
we’ve got to keep radical faculty on the faculty and who had signed and so on. And so I
talked to Rader at length and to other professors there.
HS: This is the UW?
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PR: University of Washington where I’m a graduate -
HS: You went there as a graduate student -
PR: - as a graduate student in philosophy. First year I was there I had a Woodrow Wilson
Fellowship that was a complete total free ride - but the next year I was offered a teaching
assistantship and I refused it because it required a loyalty oath. And I worked various
jobs including as a - as a drill press operator.
HS: So you actually didn’t take the TAship because of that?
PR: Oh, no. I was a loyalty oath refuser, yeah. I wouldn’t sign. I mean it seemed so
quixotic to my professors. The year after that I had completed my MA and I had an offer
of a teaching assistantship from Washington. I also had one from Cornell to go there
after I got my MA to take a Ph.D. Both required the loyalty oath and I refused both
teaching assistantships. The Department of Philosophy at Washington went out of its
way and they managed to scrounge up some pre-doctorial money or something of that
sort and they gave it to me and I worked as a teaching assistantship, but not under that
classification or title. I was on - on some kind of grant money or fellowship money that
did not require a loyalty oath.
And so I took my Ph.D., and my first teaching job after I took my Ph.D. was I went back
to Oberlin College. One of my professors there was on sabbatical. It was a one-year
sabbatical replacement appointment. Oberlin is a private college. It didn’t require the
loyalty oath.
The year after that, ‘59 to ‘60, 1 went to the University of California at Riverside, again
replacing somebody who’s on sabbatical, a one-year appointment, and at that time the
loyalty oath was held up in the courts so that there was an injunction against requiring a
loyalty oath. So I didn’t sign a loyalty oath to teach at the University of California at
Riverside.
But I had been told I when I was at Oberlin, I talked to faculty there about it and they
said, you know, it’s going to come on the private colleges if they take any federal money
or anything, and they all do, or any kind of government money, they’re going to have to
have a loyalty oath. So you’re just not going to be able to teach in the United States if
you continue this. And I did apply for jobs in Canada and Australia, and I did get a job
at the University of Alberta and I taught there from 1960 to 1963.
And then I had to make up my mind what I was going to do about this, either become a
Canadian citizen ‘cause I felt - 1 couldn’t vote up there and I just felt like a - a spectator.
And oddly enough, one of the things that effected my decision was that they showed this
film, “Operation Abolition,” on the House UnAmerican Activities Committee. It was
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showing up there in a room at [University of] Alberta and I was just thinking, “Oh, God,”
you know, “this is terrible. You know, maybe I should try to get back to the United
States.” Or else I’ve got to become a Canadian citizen. There was a lot of stuff going
on there. The fonnation of the New Democratic Party. I’ve got to become politically
active up here in Canada.
I got an offer from San Francisco State. I had met people from the San Francisco State
department in 1959. I read a paper at the American Philosophical Association meeting,
and Art Biennan and Rudy Weingartner were there, and they liked my paper. And we
went out and talked about it afterwards. And San Francisco State actually gave me an
offer for the fall of 1960, but there were two problems. It wasn’t a full-time job,
although they thought it would turn into that, and it required the loyalty oath, okay. So
I turned down San Francisco State in 1960 and I took the job at the University of Alberta.
Okay, San Francisco State gave me another offer. It was a full-time job, it was right in
my field, Ethics, for fall of 1963. And I thought - well, the other thing that had
happened was that the loyalty oath had been changed. The original oath that I had
objected to was an oath that required that you swear that you wouldn’t believe certain
things. And, you know, this may sound funny, but my philosophical view was that you
couldn’t chose your beliefs, you discovered your beliefs. You could decide to act on
them or not act on them, but asking people to swear that they wouldn’t have certain
beliefs was to me incoherent. I mean how could I swear that I wouldn’t wake up one
morning and believe in the violent overthrow of the United States? How could I say
what I was going to come to believe, as a Philosopher?
So, it was not so much [signing the oath] - it was partly political. You signed to keep your
position and do something, as Rader argued for at the University of Washington. It was
also partly philosophical. The new oath just required that you prescribe certain actions.
You swore that you wouldn’t join certain organizations, and it was advocacy rather than
believe, and that was philosophically acceptable to me. That made sense swearing that
you wouldn’t do certain things. I didn’t see how you could swear not to believe certain
things, but I did see how you swear not to do certain things. So I decided, okay, I’m
going to take the job at San Francisco - I’m going to go to San Francisco State and I’m
going to sign the oath.
So they sent me the oath, okay? And what it says on the oath is that nobody can take
any money for administering this oath, okay. I’m in Canada. I’ve got to get that oath
administered before I can be accepted for the job at San Francisco State, so it’s going to
have to be administered in Canada. In Canada, they don’t have notary publics because
the lawyers there didn’t let any business get away. You have to go see a lawyer, they do
the notarizing work. So I went in to see a Canadian lawyer and I said, “Look, I’m in an
odd situation. I’ve got this thing that has to be notarized. On the other hand, it’s from
the United States Government - or the government of the State of California, and it says
that no funds can be taken for administering this oath.” And I said, “I really don’t think
7
the government of California can tell you what to do or what you can charge and so on.”
So I said, “You know, you give me the oath, I pay you, that’s cool.” And the Canadian
lawyer looked at it and he said, “Well, I don’t think the California government can tell
me whether I can charge for it or not either,” he said, “but this is just making my day and
making me feel so glad to be a Canadian.” He said, “I just feel great to be a Canadian,”
he said, “and I’m going to administer this oath to you for free.” [Laughing] And so I held
up my hand, took the oath, signed it and headed for San Francisco. I think before San
Francesco State, that is probably as much as I can think of.
HS: No, that adds - that’s very, very good, you know, and much appreciated.
Okay, tell me what happens to you now. You’re down at San Francisco State
University. Bierman is down there, there’s this whole nine-unit load thing that’s
very, very important in terms of union activity. Now how do you get involved in all
that. I mean, it sounds like at this point it’s sort of a natural for you. You know,
you-
PR: I came there, I was thirty-one. I’ve got my Ph.D. I went straight through. I never took
time off. I got my Ph.D. at twenty-six. I’ve taught for five years so I have a history. I
actually have a background in student activism and so on, but I hit San Francisco State,
I’m thirty-one years old and I look young for my thirty-one years of age, and I’m Art
Biennan’s officemate. So you talk to Dick Axen and he’ll say, “Oh, God, I remember
you, you fuzzy-cheeked little kid coming in there to Art Bierman’s office and - and being
totally bewildered by everything that was going on,” and so on. In some ways, was kind
of a missed take on me. You know I had some commitments. I had some ideas on how
to do stuff and so on. Although nothing like Art. Just being Art’s officemate was
extraordinary. At times, it [the office] seemed like it was the center of the universe. I
was just kind of getting acclimated, but the Cadillac - the Auto Row Sit-Ins were going
on, people were coming in about that all the time and so forth. I immediately joined the
union and I believe that I would have done that whether I was Art’s office mate or not.
HS: Do you want to expand a little on Art?
PR: Yeah, well, he’s going to - in the course of this interview, he’ll be coming up all the time.
But he was tremendously well connected - and this is so crucial to us later in the strike.
He had been one of the organizers in the protest against the House UnAmerican
Activities Committee - and his wife, Sue Biennan, had been involved in the freeway
protests and chaining themselves to trees in the Panhandle, and they’d been active in
Democratic politics, the Young Democratic Club or whatever it’s called for ages in San
Francisco.
But as a result of the protest against the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, Herb
Williams and Art had founded the AFT local at San Francisco State. They flipped for
who would be Card No. 1 and Herb Williams won the flip and he was Card No. 1 and Art
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was Card No. 2. And then he’d [Arthur] had gone on to organize locals on other
campuses and was the moving force behind faculty unionism in California.
And, you know, the TAs [local] in the UC system just won something - [it was in the
paper this week] - and they say they’d been fighting for it for fifteen years. I mean, hell,
we were involved in helping set up TA locals back in the 60s and so on. It was primarily
in our system, and at one time there was thoughts that we would have all higher
education unions together. That didn’t work out, and so forth. But - yeah, Art was just
a tremendous activist - he thought big.
HS: Was he charismatic? Is there a -
PR: Oh, yeah. He had - he had a style. He’d march around a building blowing a horn and
expecting the walls to fall down almost, and be surprised they hadn’t. And I saw
tremendous nerve, tremendous imagination and a great deal of charisma and wit, yeah.
He is just - an extraordinary person. Later on, we lost the election in California and the
primary reason was that they froze Art out of that election. I mean we bounced back and
forth on the leadership in the statewide council. I think we should talk about that. I’ll
just say that I think that that was really unfortunate that we lost. That we should have
won that CB election. If we had, I think things would have been different in higher
education. And we’ll get to that.
HS: Yeah, we’ll get to that -
PR: That’s a ways down.
HS: That’s a ways down the line, yeah.
PR: Down the road by some years.
Okay, so I arrived in 1963 and most of the first year I’m just getting kind of acclimated
and - what the hell did I do in ‘63? I don’t know. They elected me acting chair of the
department in - Weingartner went on leave. I was - just been there a year, ‘63 to ‘64,
and I’m elected acting chair - maybe I got a little charisma I don’t know about. I don’t
know. [Laughing]
HS: Could be.
PR: I get elected buyer manager of the co-op and now I’m elected acting chair of the
department in ‘64. I got to know some of the students. Guy Sandler was a student in
my class. He’s one of the students that set up the Experimental College. He said,
“God, we just discovered it,” you know, “student government controls over a million
bucks,” or something of that sort he said. And so they took over the student government.
They set up the experimental college. They started a tutorial program. So I was new to
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the students and was aware of some of things that students were doing at San Francisco
State.
So I became acting chair of the department the second year I was here, that would be ‘64,
‘65. And now when I came here, I knew I was going to be teaching a four-course load.
I hadn’t taught that at Alberta, I hadn’t taught that Oberlin, I hadn’t taught that at UC
Riverside, but I mean, hey, a lot of people taught it and seemed to manage it and so I
didn’t thi nk it would be that big a problem. But I must tell you that when I got here, I
think partly for elitist and snobbish reasons, I just didn’t like saying I taught a twelve-unit
load because if you were good in your profession, you didn’t teach a twelve-unit load. So
it was partly that. But it was partly, it turned out that just that extra course kind of got in
the way, I mean, if you were trying to do a lot of different things and so on, it made it
almost impossible to schedule a two-day or three-day schedule. It meant almost always
you had to have a five-day schedule. It just got in the way and I didn’t like that, okay.
So - and also it seemed to me an ideal issue because it could be done as a non-economic
issue and it could just be done on the job, okay. So as we play with the nine-unit load
down through the years, I mean, sometimes it’s going to require a twenty- five percent
funding increase to cover the extra courses, but sometimes it can just be an arrangement
that we think will be of benefit to the faculty and it won’t hurt the students. You’re
teaching a hundred students a year and you’re teaching them in four sections of twenty-
five, you might think you’ll teach forty- five students in one section and thirty- five in
another and then a nice small twenty-unit class and that nobody’s going to notice the
difference except the faculty. They’re going to have a three-course load and it’s going to
make a big difference to them and the students aren’t going to suffer and so on. So the
nine-unit load can be handled as a non-economic demand and it’s also something that you
can just do on the job. Just, you know, drop a fourth course and so on.
But it also turned out to be - as I got interested in it, I actually read all the damn - that the
system ran on formulas. Everything in the state college and university system runs off
of a formula, something called a staffing formula. I read all these formulas. Most
formulas are driven by something. Most of them are driven by full-time student
equivalents. They have a student taking nine units, a student taking six, you add ‘em
together, that’s one [full-time equivalent] student. So staffing generally runs off a full-
time equivalent student. As I remember, the toilet paper budget runs off of actual bodies
on campus, [Laughing] rather than full-time equivalent students.
HS: [Laughing]
PR: And security, actually, runs off of the number of bodies on campus. So the security
budget and other budgets. Some of them run off of the number of bodies on campus,
some run off the number of full-time equivalent students and so. So I read all that stuff.
I dug into all that stuff. And I realized that there are various tricks and devices that you
could use to rig the fonnula. So what I proposed to the Philosophy Department was that
10
using their rules and their system, we teach a three-course load. And I had all this stuff
all worked out. I’m not going to go in the details, it’s very complicated, but - but I had it
all wired up and I was chair - so I scheduled a department meeting. We were going to
go on the three-course load.
And I got there and I handed out all this stuff which seems to me to be really great, and
nobody will move the damn motion to go on three-course load. And I’m getting really
excited and frustrated and finally I say, “Art, will you chair this meeting for me, for a
minute,” ‘cause I was chair. And so Art said, “Sure, I’ll be glad to chair it.” And so I
said, “I move that the Philosophy Department go on a three-course load next fall,” and I
said, “I want to speak in favor of this motion.” I said, “Look, I don’t even have tenure.
I’ve only been here one year. I’m impetuous. Nobody’s going to be hurt by this.
We’ll either get the three-course load or if there’s problem or so on, I’ll take all the
blame. Rudy’s gone. I’m just an acting chair. Everybody’s completely safe.
Nobody’s going to get hurt except maybe me and I don’t care, you know, let’s do it,
okay?” And so they all voted to do it. And we did it. And so we came back that fall
on a three-course load.
HS: Now is this - did you do this as - as the AFT local or as the -
PR: Oh, no. It was not - it was not AFT and it wasn’t taken - it was fiddled. I mean I
fiddled the books so it looked like we were teaching four courses. In fact, the word - de
facto three, okay? And I do this as an exemplary act just to show that it can be done.
So we’re - it’s kn own the Philosophy Department is only teaching three courses. I go
around to all the other departments and I say, “Look,” not all of them - 1 go around to
them - 1 remember going to English, Eric Solomon is sitting in the front row, Dan Knapp
in front, I say, “You guys can go on the - on the three-course load and I’ll help you - and
I’ll help you do it.” And I spread the word throughout the system. I am a representative
from the local, going to the state college council and I tell other people - Fullerton
Philosophy Department goes on a nine -unit load fairly quickly. San Diego goes on a -
on a three-course load in the Philosophy Department, and there within a few years they
have the whole school on it and eventually the whole [university]. It’s easier actually if
you’re fiddling it, according to the rules, if you work with larger units.
For example, in the School of Humanities, I could put the English Department on a three-
course load. I did put the Philosophy on a three-course, there’s no way I could do
Foreign Language for various reasons about foreign language instruction. The smallness
of the fourth year class - there was just - you know, it’s a complicated technical sort of
issue. So anyway, I’m committed to the three-course load in various places in the
system or doing assistance outside the union, but it’s - it has its possibilities and openings
for the union.
HS: Okay, we’re just about to the end of the side.
11
[End of Tape 1- Side 1]
[Begin Tape 1 - Side 2]
HS: The reason that I raise the question about whether it was or wasn’t as part of the
union because Bierman, in his oral history, feels that this was a serious contribution
on your part. That it was an aid to enhancing the reputation of the union.
PR: Okay, yeah. Okay, so now there’s two ways you can go with this. I mean basically
what - this is being taken by smart administering at the department level, and then at
other places as some of the people came up from the ranks and went into administrative
positions basically by smart administering. The year before I became elected president
of the union, but I think I had already been nominated, I was offered two administrative
positions to continue doing it this way by - by fiddling. By working the rules. By smart
administering you could - you could really improve people’s quality of life. You could
get ‘em better schedules and so on. And so I was being looked at as a sort of a smart
administrator.
So Jim Wilson in the School of Humanities spoke to me about being - 1 don’t know,
either an assistant or an associate dean and putting the whole school on a nine -unit load.
HS: But it looked like four though?
PR: Yeah. Still looked like four, yeah. Okay.
And then I was called in by the central administration of San Francisco State, by Dean
Fetter, and I was offered a position in the central administration of San Francisco State.
Not quite with carte blanche as I’d been offered to do whatever I could do to fiddle stuff
and put the whole thing - but, still, I was called in because I looked like an administrator.
And my wife and I talked about the offers and I just - I’m not an administrator. And
besides, this is supposed to be exemplary. It’s supposed to prepare the way and to show
that you can do stuff, but I don’t want to do it that way and it’s very dangerous to do it
that way because the way I was doing it, you not only could put a whole department on it,
as I did, but you could just put the senior faculty on it. It was a hell of a lot easier to do
that than put the whole department on. Or you could put your in group on and so on,
you know.
So it was - it was also highly dangerous to do it - to do it that way. And, in fact, that’s
the way it’s ended up. We now have flexibility. In a lot of departments you’ll find
some people teaching four and some teaching three and so on and so on, okay. So I had
two offers -
HS: By dangerous you mean it’s favoritism and divisiveness -
12
PR: Oh, yeah, of course. Yeah. And we also have had - now on salaries and - you have
merit salary increases, you have constant review of salaries, and you have some people
making more - getting steps and others not. So all of this stuff ended up getting done the
wrong way.
Okay, so I had to make a decision about what - what to do, and I accepted the nomination
to run for president of the - of the AFT local. I said I’m sticking with the union
basically. I’m not - I’m not going into administration and try to wire the system. I’m
going to try and do it on the job and take it. Manipulation is showing that it doesn’t have
adverse effects. It’s kind of an experiment. It’s kind of exemplary. But, you know,
we don’t have to just rig the rules to make it look like we’re teaching four when we’re
not, and teaching three is working out fine. We’re just going to try and do that, okay.
So that was an issue that I was identified with and I was elected president of the union
because of my work on the three-course load and -
HS: Okay -
PR: So I’m elected president of the AFT, 1352, for the year - fall tenn, ‘67 to ‘68. And the
reason why I’m elected president of the union after just having been there four years is
primarily because of what I’ve been doing on the three-course load.
HS: Okay, I have one question that - there’s a point when Ronald Reagan - Bierman, I
think, suggests must have been told about - about the three-load, four-load - you
know -
PR: Yeah -
HS: - three-class, four-class situation, and decided - or his people decided that, well,
then, if folks are teaching only nine units, then we can cut their salary.
PR: Right.
HS: Is that later on?
PR: That’s later. That was -
HS: It’s later. Okay.
PR: - that’s - when we get to whether we were tailgating the students, that’s relevant because
we had -
HS: - at the point that it comes in - okay.
13
PR: - we had this threat from Reagan at the time that we went out on strike. The people that
were on three-course loads would be docked twenty-five percent. But it wasn’t just the
people that were on, because it was unclear whether he could cut them. If you cooked
the books right, you showed four. So, you know, that was going to be a total tangle.
But we were in the midst of an organizing drive. We were circulating pledge cards to
faculty asking them to pledge to teach only three courses in the spring semester. So
basically what we were trying for was a twenty-five percent strike. I mean instead of
asking people to go all the way out, which is scary as hell, you can get five days and fired
and so on, we’re asking them to lay down one course and let’s see what happens, you
know.
So, we’re in the midst of what we think is a great organizing tool, the twenty-live percent
strike, if you like. I mean, we’re going to withdraw service from one -
HS: Okay, Now this is during the student strike, so this is the latter part of ‘68.
PR: This is - now we’re talking what happened in ‘68, ‘69, yeah.
HS: Okay.
PR: So that stuff from Reagan came down in ‘68, ‘69 -
HS: Okay, it’s a little later -
PR: - so we should set that aside -
HS: Yeah, let’s come -
PR: - and come back to that, yeah.
HS: Yeah, we’ll pull back now to the point when you’re elected AFT president, ‘67, ‘68.
PR: Yeah. Okay, well, a lot of things happened that year. First of all, when I became
president - I’ve always believed, and I still believe, it’s absolutely important to get your
paper out and get it out fast. You have to be able to respond really, really quickly to
what’s going on and so on. And what I found was that if we wanted to put something
out, we took it down to the student affairs office or something, and when they got around
to it, they duplicated it for us. Or we could, I guess, go to a commercial place, but,
again, there’d be delay and so forth and so on. So about the first thing that I did was I
got the union to vote to buy a mimeograph machine, and I bought a Gestetner. I had it
there in my office in the Humanities building in 342. So we had our own mimeograph
machine. We didn’t have to wait on others to get our stuff out. If we wanted - if we
typed it, we could just run it immediately. If we wanted to do a fancy layout and so on
with pressed letters and so on, then it would take about thirty minutes to go to a shop and
14
have them run that through a stencil maker and bring it back and so on. But basically I
now had a response time of an hour or two, and that was - 1 actually think that was an
important contribution to the union to kind of toughen up the soft underbelly in tenns of
being able to respond quickly, get your - get your paper out, set up a good distribution
system and things of that sort.
HS: I’ve got a question. You know, the Philosophy Department, generally speaking
through the literature, seems to have been one department with a pretty good
reputation in terms of sympathy towards the union and so forth. But one thing
that occurs to me is, you know, did you have some faculty members who looked at
you and said what is this young guy doing? He should be, you know, studying
philosophy in the library. He shouldn’t be doing any activity. Was there any of
that at all particularly?
PR: Not from my own department. I was elected president of the union in a very close vote,
though. I think there have only been about two contested elections in the local.
Generally, whoever’s put up for president is elected. So I think I was regarded as kind
of ahead of my time in running for president of the union after just being there four years
and so on. I ran against a guy named Walt Coppeck in Psychology who had been there
ten or fifteen years or something like that. I was an assistant professor. I believe he
was a professor or whatever.
So, yeah, I didn’t - it couldn’t be said that I got a mandate, but I did - 1 did win the
election. But it was a fairly close election, so - outside my department -
HS: Why - I notice normally, up to this point at least, in looking at the oral histories, it’s
almost as if Bierman and a couple of guys kind of decide - and Williams - well, you
know, you be president this year and then the guy would run and it was almost like
it was uncontested. It’s like the few wheel horses who were - you know, it’s not that
they’re running away is a little elite, it’s just that they’re the guys who are active.
Why is this one contested?
PR: Yeah, I was - 1 was wondering that myself. And I have difficulty - okay, I’m the
president following Eric Solomon. I think Eric may have been a little controversial too.
He was -
HS: [Laughing]
PR: - he was new boy on the block, also, in some ways. And so - and actually, I mean, Eric
ran and - 1 can’t remember who he ran against, but I think his election was contested. So
this is not the first - so I think there were people in the union who felt that there were
radicals coming into the School of Humanities and that things needed to slow up a bit and
that we needed some people that were - had been around longer and kind of knew more
about how the system worked and so forth. So there were contested elections. Eric’s
15
was contested and my election was contested. And I’m sorry - 1 mean at the time it
would have been clearer to me. I just don’t remember exactly - 1 mean I think I put out a
position statement. I think Walt Coppeck put out a position statement. I’m sure those
are in the boxes that have been donated to the Labor Archives. But, in fact, whereas
there hadn’t been contested elections in the past, and in the future, contested elections
were quite unusual, there was a period there of two years where there were contested
elections for the presidency of the local.
HS: Art was - well -
PR: Art was strongly supportive of my election.
HS: Okay.
PR: You bet. [Laughing] I mean, I wouldn’t have been elected without Art’s support. I
believe that - although Eric was not as enthusiastic about the nine-course load as I was, I
believe that Eric was strongly supportive of my election, and I believe that - 1 mean, I
was always willing to do the work. I believe in reading Eric’s oral history, he says that I
was his right-hand person or something of that sort. And so - in any case, Eric was -
HS: Yeah, there are a couple of spots where it’s close to that. Literally.
PR: Yeah. So - so anyway, I worked hard for Eric when he was president of the union.
That year was the first year, I think, that we started to see faculty carrying signs. Now
I’m not sure because it might have been during Eric’s year. And we carried signs for
non-bread-and-butter union issues. The first time that faculty carried signs at San
Francisco State was either during Eric’s presidency or mine, and it’s hard - 1 can’t
remember - whoever spoke to the media that day was probably the - it was his
presidency. I can’t remember if Eric spoke to them or if I spoke to them. But we
marched, we set up an infonnational picket line in front of the administration building at
San Francisco State. About fifteen or twenty faculty. And it was against the release of
class ranking. So that was the first issue that had the faculty actually pick up a sign and
start marching around.
I think it was during my presidency - very early that fall and during my presidency, but it
might have been the previous spring during Eric’s, ‘cause I remember getting there really
early and nobody was there and I started to worry whether people would come. I mean I
- my recollections of worry suggest that I was kind of doing it, but I could have had the
same kind of worry and concern if I was helping organize it on behalf of Eric’s
presidency. But eventually people showed up, okay. So we’re all set to march -
HS: So this would have been spring - it would have been spring of ‘67 or fall of ‘67 -
PR: It would have been fall of ‘67 or spring of ‘67, I’m not sure.
16
HS: Right.
PR: Which Eric would have been spring of ‘67 -
HS: How come the media comes to this?
PR: What?
HS: How come the media comes to this?
PR: ‘Cause it’s - the sight - 1 mean at this time the sight of professors with signs, I mean - 1
mean, now we’re just so used to this sort of thing, but - 1 mean we discovered that if you
could turn out twenty or twenty-five professors with signs, when they showed twenty-
five professors marching at you - 1 remember I was going to try to get a whole busload of
faculty to go up to Sonoma to sit in the trustee’s meeting with signs later in the year of
my presidency. And I was going to charter a bus and everything. Well, I couldn’t get
enough people to fill a bus. We went up there with two cars. And there were people
from Sonoma and maybe a sprinkling of people from some other campuses. We had
about twenty-five or thirty faculty. And the cameraman had us marching across this
kind of empty field with kind of a curve in our ranks or something. I mean, God, it
looked like [laughing] one of those long marches, something like that. All these faculty
with signs coming at you and going into this building and then sitting at the back of the
trustees meeting, not saying anything, just sitting there with our signs. So that was a big
step. A professor picking up a sign and - in public.
I was going to tell you a little bit about the signs. Something about - Okay, so for this,
everybody made their own sign, you know. We’re protesting class rankings.
Everybody made their own sign. So we get there and we’re about to form our little
circle and walk around with our signs and somebody - God, I hate to mention the name,
but it was somebody from English and I think it was Leonard Wolff, but I’m not
absolutely certain. So let’s - let’s just say it was somebody from English said that some
of those signs aren’t appropriate for a faculty demonstration, okay.
So we voted on every goddamn sign. Each sign was held up and the group voted it up or
down, and two signs were voted down. And I can’t remember what was on those signs.
I mean, God, by now, you know, totally innocuous. But - so I mean this is a long time
ago, okay. So there were two signs there that we thought were inappropriate for faculty
so we start marching, okay.
Now the students come to join us in support. They’ve got signs, okay. [Some of their
signs are not okay, so we tell them that we can’t allow them.] The reason I think I was
pretty involved in this is because I remember I talked a lot to the students because a
couple of them were PLP students and I had them in class. Progressive Labor Party.
17
HS: Oh, yeah -
PR: - Progressive Labor Party, a faction in the SDS, okay, the hard-line faction in the SDS,
okay. So John Kinney and Tewes — Dick Tewes, I think, were there. I knew these
guys. They were philosophy majors, okay. And I said, look, we just killed two of our
signs. This is a faculty thing. We really appreciate your support. We’ve supported
you at various times, and now you’re supporting us and - and some of your signs are
being judged inappropriate by our members and we’re going to ask you to put those signs
down and continue to march with us without those signs.
Well, it was touch and go, but they did, okay. But that - you know, but later - this is
going to be a running thing of the students doing their thing and the faculty doing their
thing and trying to do it together and sometimes there being serious conflicts about the
message being sent, the tactics and so on. At least, to my memory, the first
informational picketing by faculty took place at San Francisco State - in California. It
took place at State. It was over a non-bread-and-butter issue. It was a war issue.
Vietnam War issue. A release of class rankings. It was an infonnational picketing
protesting the release of class rankings. And that was - that was either - that was either
Eric Solomon’s presidency in the spring of ‘67, or else it was very early on, right at the
start of my presidency in the fall of ‘67. I just don’t remember.
HS: Okay, You mentioned the anti-war movement. It was a protest in favor of the
anti-war movement, as well as not releasing the rankings?
PR: It was part of the anti-war protest, but it was on a narrow issue -
HS: Of course, because the rankings -
PR: - were being used for the draft -
HS: Right, right, right. Yeah. For people who might not remember this, by the way,
we might note that the class ranking has something to do with your deferment?
PR: Yes. So if we -
HS: To get out of the war in Vietnam -
PR: - released class rankings, we were participating in the drafting mechanism of the United
States and the furnishing of soldiers to fight in the Vietnam War and so on. Oh, yeah,
I’m sorry I didn’t make that clear.
HS: Well, I forgot too. I was there too -
18
PR: But, yeah, no, class rankings meant - if you submitted class rankings, you were
cooperating in the - in the furtherance of war. And there may have been philosophical
issues, too, about the appropriateness of class rank being used as a basis for defennent
and so on and so on. But - so there was both a philosophical issue and a cooperation
issue and that - and it was a - it was a - it was not a bread-and-butter union - union issue.
HS: Yeah.
PR: Although, I was in there as president to run those bread-and-butter issues [transcript
redacted by editor].
HS: So -
PR: I noticed in Art’s and Eric’s oral histories these years kind of - kind of run together. A
couple of things I want to kind of pick off where my memory disagrees. Okay, so that
was the first infonnational picketing. We also were starting to appear at trustee meetings
with our signs and we’d march around. And then we’d march into the trustee meeting
with signs and so on. This is under the aegis of the college council, which was the
federation of the AFT locals at the various state college - not yet university at that time.
State college campuses.
HS: What kind of beefs were you pushing at this point relative to the - to marching on
the trustees -
PR: On the trustees it would have depended on their agenda, and I don’t remember what was
on their agenda at that particular meeting. But it was agenda oriented. It could very
well have been - and I think probably was actually - a bread-and-butter union issue.
Either salary or load or something of that sort. We were starting to make our presence
known visibly and hit the media and get pictures of professors marching with signs that
year. Okay.
Now, so - so that sort of thing was going on. People were getting used to professors
having beefs and professors picking up signs and professors marching. But it’s just
informational picketing. It’s just to inform the public about our concerns and so on.
But the big thing that happened during my year as president that we actually did try to get
a strike going. That fell apart and Art in his oral history talks about these national
organizers. He mentions one, Joe Caselli. The other guy was Dan Stubbs. So we had
money and support from national AFT the year I was president. They were not too
conspicuous the next year in our - in our strike. Our support there was - tended not to be
from the AFT and from the national. But the year that I was president, Marshall
Axelrod, who was state president of - of CFT, he was with us a lot, attending our
executive committee meetings. Most of the executive committee meetings actually took
place in this house where we’re doing this recording. And my wife used to say, “I don’t
mind the executive committee meetings being here except for one person. Who’s that
19
person that has that really loud voice that keeps waking me up?” That was Eric
Solomon. [Laughing]
HS: [Laughing]
PR: His voice would kind of go around the corner and up the stairs. So we had national
organizers out here -
HS: That’s 811 Castro in San Francisco for the record.
PR: Yeah, 811 Castro, yeah. And - so we had national organizers out here. We had the
state president of the CFT. And looking back on it, it’s all a little bit weird to me
because Summerskill was president and basically the big issue seemed to be that the
board of trustees is not treating our president [fairly]. Our president didn’t want to call the
police on campus and he wanted to deal with the students, okay. So - so this is really
weird. I mean, basically we’re getting a union all in a tizzy because the boss isn’t being
treated nicely [laughing] by the board of trustees, and this is an issue that’s grabbing the
attention of the state CFT and it’s grabbing the attention of the national AFT and they’re
sending money and they’re sending organizers and so on.
So - 1 don’t pretend at this time to be able to recall or understand all the ins - ins and outs
of that. At one time I was so paranoid, partly as a result of hearing a call that Caselli
was making to somebody, to think that they were trying to get us out on strike just to - 1
think a tenn that’s used by organizers is a “jackass strike,” or something where you
discredit a leadership by getting them into a no-win strike situation. Because there were
a lot of problems. I mean we were kind of different and we were - seemed to be
independent and I think - and yet we were a huge unit, over ten thousand faculty, and one
that looked ripe for collective bargaining and for unionization. I mean that was a big
plum there and I think - 1 think they felt that we couldn’t do it and they needed us. So
I’m not quite sure what was - what was going on there. I mean I was a little puzzled
about it.
On thing - The situation was really - was bad. Our academic senate went down to
appeal to the trustees and got treated like kindergarten kids. And they came back and
spilled their guts about how terrible they’d been treated and so on and so on. And
Summerskill was called down there and summarily dressed down for not calling in the
police. But then it turned out that the police had said they shouldn’t be called in because
it would create a worse situation than there was and things were cooling down and so on
and so on.
So all this sort of stuff was going on and we were setting up a faculty meeting that was
going to lead to the faculty recognizing that they were powerless and have to turn to the
AFT as the one organization on campus that had outside connections and that could so to
speak deal with the outside world. So the set up for this aborted strike was that a faculty
20
meeting was called and I rented a large room over at the Red Chimney in Stonestown,
which is a bar/restaurant, and we’d march out of the faculty meeting and we’d march
over to the Red Chimney and we would take a strike vote. Okay.
Now -
HS: Now - okay. What - you’re going to take a strike vote on - what kinds of issues
were you going to utilize?
PR: Okay. That’s what I - that’s what’s so weird about it. Basically it’s - the strike vote is
going to be more autonomy issues, no police on campus. The union aspect is - which
again comes up in the next year when we really did strike, it’s going to be working
conditions that - you know, this campus needs to have a - 1 think Summerskill wanted a
convocation and he was being ordered that he couldn’t do that sort of thing and so on.
So it was basically supportive of - of these sorts of things. As I said, they would not
look like good union issues to some people.
But the other thing that was going on was that the AFT thought that a barrier to securing
collective bargaining in California were the academic senates, okay. And what had
happened at San Francisco State was the academic senate had just crawled back and they
had come before the faculty and they had said, we’re useless. They don’t respect us.
We can’t do anything, okay. And yet - and yet everybody thought that something
needed to be done. Although what needed to be done was to basically support the
president, support reasonable dealings with the students, support not having police on
campus, support having a convocation to deal with - these were mainly war issues as I
recall, and rather than - than black student union and so on.
And all of this stuff needs to be done and Summerskill was open to doing that and
seemed like a good guy. And the senate can’t do anything, okay. So the plan was to get
a lot of people on the senate. Not just to say that they’d been kicked around and all of
that, but to actually resign. So that was regarded by the national, I think, as something
that needed to be done. I mean the union position - the local AFT position up to that
time had been that the senate kind of does curriculum stuff like what we aspire to do is
the bread-and-butter issues and be the muscle, too, if they get into trouble on their policy
stuff. If they’re not respected and so on then we’ll provide the muscle for ‘em, a place
for each, okay.
But the senate was going around saying we’re useless, we’re useless. So I think the
thought was well, if they think they’re useless, why don’t - why don’t we see if we can be
useful - somebody has to step in. There’s a real problem. The senate has said it’s
useless, so why don’t we step in and see if we can be the rescuing heroes and so forth.
And this seemed to get a lot of support from Axelrod, it got support from the national.
At this distance now, I can’t quite recall why we were getting all this money and all this
support.
21
Okay, so we - so it’s set up and - primarily Art Biennan but other people that knew
people start calling members of the senate and they pledge to resign at this faculty
meeting, okay. So we got thirteen or fourteen members of the academic senate - 1 served
on the academic senate at various times. I don’t know how - how many were on it,
twenty-eight, thirty, something like that. Anyway, we got a big chu nk of the academic
senate that’s going to resign at the faculty meeting. We have the faculty meeting,
everyone’s saying the senate can’t do anything. There are these things that got to be
done. We’ve got to have some - some respect and the senate can’t do anything.
And so Rudy Weingartner gets up and he resigns from the academic senate. He’s
supposed to lead it off. He’s supposed to be followed by thirteen or fourteen people that
will resign from the academic senate. And so he resigns from the academic senate,
okay. And then other people that are supposed to resign, they get up and they don’t
resign. They say, well, maybe we should give the academic senate one more chance and
so forth. If you read Axen’s book, you’ll see that he says something about people who
had agreed at two or three in the morning had second thoughts and so forth and so on, if
that was a reasonable thing and so on. But for some of us, that was a huge sort of
betrayal that people that had said they would resign, didn’t resign.
Now Eric says in his statement that he did resign -
HS: Yes, he does. I recall that.
PR: Yes. Now I’m a little unclear about that because what I remember clearly - if he says he
did, he did. I mean, you know - what stuck in my mind was Rudy’s resignation because
it hurt him so terribly when the other people didn’t that he had been told were going to
resign. And I think in some cases he may have been told by them that they were going
to resign and then they - then they didn’t do that. And he - the next year he left San
Francisco State. He took a position at Vassar and kind of gave up on unionism. He
became dean at Northwestern and a vice-president at Pittsburgh and so forth. And he
was a really great guy and it was just really sad that he was just burned by that.
Okay, so -
HS: What department was he in?
PR: He was Philosophy.
HS: Oh, Philosophy.
PR: He was the guy that was chair of Philosophy and that I took over for him while he was on
sabbatical.
22
HS: Oh, yeah, got it. I remember now.
PR: Yeah. So - okay, so here I am. I’ve got a union meeting scheduled. So we have to
leave that meeting and go over to the union meeting and that’s a tough - it’s just a blur to
me. That’s about the toughest meeting I’ve ever had to try and run because some people
are just so absolutely furious. I remember Rudy Weingartner - oh, and one of the nice
things about having national organizers around - generally I do most of the shit work.
Getting the stuff, sign paper, all that stuff, okay, so I’m used to doing that sort of stuff. I
know what a drag it can be and how sometimes you have to do it in a huge hurry and so
on. Well, you’ve got national organizers and they do all that stuff, okay.
So Dan Stubbs -
HS: So you had national organizers actually on the scene?
PR: Oh, you bet!
HS: Not full time?
PR: Yeah, they were here -
HS: Oh, my goodness!
PR: - full-time. We had two. Joe Caselli and Dan Stubbs. AFT heroes, just out of jail two
months before in some big Illinois teacher’s strike. K to 12 and so on. Oh, yeah.
HS: So somebody back East did really - for the moment anyway, put a lot into this.
PR: Oh, hell yes. We had money, we had organizers, we had the state organization. And
we also had promises that we were going to cave the academic senate as an effective
force and show that the union could so something. And they were - and they were
backing us. But we had to back off.
HS: Yeah. Okay, now Stubbs and Caselli - do you remember their first names?
PR: Dan Stubbs and Joe Caselli.
HS: They’re the national organizers -
PR: Yeah.
HS: - and Axelrod is the - what’s his first name again?
PR: Marshall.
23
HS: Yeah. He’s the CFT state president.
PR: He’s the state president of the CFT.
HS: Yeah, okay.
PR: And we got - and money has been committed from the national AFT and so on to support
us. So we’re at this - so we’re in this room at the - at the Red Chimney in Stonestown
and I’ve got some faculty that say, screw the senate. We’re still going to go out on
strike. And Rudy is marching around with his sign, up and down, because Dan Stubbs
had arranged to have signs there and everything in case we took a strike vote. We’d
have picket signs and so as you’d walk into this room, there’s all the picket signs along
the wall. And Rudy Weingartner walks right over and grabs one and is marching
around. Others say, well, the senate welched on us and this is really just not a [good
idea.] Remember, this strike - and I should have mentioned this right at the start, this is
not a strike until demands are met. This is a protest strike and it’s going to be a one or
three-day or something like that. It’s not - it’s not - but it’s not infonnational picketing
anymore. We’re going to withdraw services where we’re going to stay inside - they
have this five day rule, if you’re absent without leave live days, you’re fired. I think
we’re aware of it at that time. Certainly we’ve become aware of it next year. But I
believe we’re aware of it at this time and we’re deliberately staying inside the five-day
thing. So we’re not asking people to, you know, worry about the -
[End of Tape 1- Side 2]
[Begin Tape 2 - Side 3]
HS: This is Side 3.
Okay, Peter, you say that this strike, then, is to be controlled, it’s to be a protest
strike?
PR: It’s to be a protest strike. No, we’re not going out until our demands are met or anything
of that sort. In fact, I don’t believe that we had [Labor Council okay]. All the support
that we were getting from labor is strictly AFT. We’ve got the state president attending
our executive committee meetings. Then we start having national organizers sitting in
on our executive committee meetings, and we haven’t approached the labor council.
And I think partly because they are not labor council issues. I mean, as I said before, it’s
a kind of weird sort of situation. Basically what we’re going to show is that we can do
stuff the academic senate can’t. We’re going to show that we’re an effective force, and
things of that sort.
And so the idea was that we’d go out for a few days - 1 can’t remember how many - but it
24
was under five days, I know that. But it was not going to be informational picketing.
We weren’t just going to march around saying we’ve got grievances, there are problems.
We’re going to withhold services, okay. We’re easing in, okay. But we are actually
going to withhold services and expect the pay docks and so forth. So -
HS: You don’t have a contract now do you?
PR: No, no. No, it’s - so this is - this is serious business. No, we don’t have recognition.
We do have the right to meet and confer as a legitimate faculty organization. The
request is supposed to be met by the administration and meet and confer under, I think,
the Brown Act or something. I forget the exact law, but we do have what were called
“meet and confer privileges.”
So anyway, the result was that -
HS: Before we go on to the result, let me ask you - okay. You - maybe want to cover
this now, I’m not sure. But we need it to make sure we hit it. There’s all this
support coming from your national and from your state at this particular time -
PR: Yes -
HS: - for the sixty -
PR: AFT. It’s the ’67-‘68.
HS: - ‘67-‘68 year. And you say there seems to be less strike - excuse me. Less support
coming from the AFT International and so forth the next year when the big strike
occurs. Do you have any idea why? And you also say that other people’s oral
histories are - you know, seem to not suggest this.
PR: Oh, no. First - okay. One thing - I’ve had the benefit of reading Eric Solomon’s oral
history and also read a transcript of Art Bierman’s oral history, and he mentions the
national AFT and he mentions Joe Caselli. He doesn’t mention Dan Stubbs, the other
national organizer that was out here. And I think Art was clear about this. But in his
oral history, it sounds like they were here during the ‘68-‘69 strike. And we didn’t have
national organizers out here. The - one reason I think was relations were strained. They
put money in here and they sent organizers and we didn’t pull it off because, you know,
the senate - the people that were going to resign didn’t resign. We didn’t get the
momentum at that meeting that we expected to generate with fourteen resignations of
campus leaders from the senate and so on.
HS: Okay. So you’re saying -
PR: Secondly -
25
HS: - we’re talking about now is pretty crucial?
PR: I’m sorry, what?
HS: You’re saying that the situation we’re talking about now, you know, has - has some
long-term repercussions?
PR: Yeah, it does because - also the membership - Joe Caselli got up at our meeting to speak
and he was - you know, he was kind of - he’s used to working K to 12. He doesn’t really
think professors are that different. He thinks they need to be told what to do and so on
and so on. And he doesn’t come across professorial at all, and basically they sort of got
run out of town. I can’t - 1 think I literally drove ‘em to the airport, I mean, you know -
that they - they - the meeting was very difficult. The national organizers thought that we
should still protest, but, I mean, what’s the senate? They already said they can’t do
anything and so some of ‘em didn’t resign. They’re going back to play their sandbox
faculty government or something. But you, the people here in this room, can do
something and should do something and so on. But it just wasn’t there, you know. So -
HS: Now we’re talking about - we’re back to the result then?
PR: Yeah, okay, so the result was that we voted not to go out on [strike].
HS: Oh, not to go out?
PR: Not to go out. We didn’t do the protest, no. The vote was - and I don’t remember how
close it was or not, but it was a very divisive, very difficult meeting and - and very hard
words were spoken to some of the - to the national organizers by some people. I mean
who are you to be telling us what to do and so forth and so on. And it was a very -
HS: Do you remember who said some of these things?
PR: No, I don’t. I can’t remember. I can remember some faculty marching - Rudy
particularly, but others - grabbing signs and begin marching - 1 mean, it’s a - 1 know it’s
impossible during the damn meeting. I mean you’ve got people walking up and down
and plus we’re all drinking. We’re at the Red Chimney and people are really upset and
distressed, and it’s a really difficult meeting to chair and to maintain order and to get
votes. And somehow we get through it and the vote is not to go out on strike, okay.
Again, because - not to go out on a protest strike of one to three days, whatever it was
going to be. That that action will not be taken. This is a disappointment to the national
organizers and they leave and I think it does have a serious effect on our relationship with
the national.
One just kind of anecdotal bit. Stubbs wrestled up these signs, maybe a hundred picket
26
signs. AFT 1352. AFL/CIO. Your traditional type bug in the corner. A union bug in
the corner. All that stuff and so on. So he got the signs printed, but then he couldn’t -
he had great difficulty finding handles to put the signs on. And so apparently he just
couldn’t find any - so what he ended up with were real police-fighting hand holders -
scab-fighting handles. These - these signs were on things - they weren’t quite two-by-
four’s, but they were damn near. They were these big heavy pieces of wood.
So at the end of the meeting, I’m sitting there just totally drained and exhausted. Most
difficult meeting I ever had to run in my life, I think, you know. And we got a hundred -
except maybe Rudy took his home [laughing] - we got about a hundred picket signs over
there and some of the students come up and say, hey, since you’re not going to use ‘em,
can we have ‘em? And I said, hell, yes. Take ‘em. And good use to them, you know.
And I swear, for the next ten or twelve years - ‘cause I could recognize that piece of
wood because it was almost a two-by-four, I’d see our - our sticks. The piece of wood
that our AFL/CIO, AFT signs had been on - I’d see ‘em at anti-war demonstrations and
elsewhere. I mean [laughing] - so the sticks went marching on anyway.
HS: That’s a good story.
PR: They were really - they were really solid pieces of wood that those - those signs were
attached to. So - okay, so that was -
HS: Before we go on, do you remember any role that Art played at that meeting? Art
Bierman?
PR: Should know.
HS: And what Eric said?
PR: Should know, but I can’t remember. It was just the strain of trying to maintain order, of
recognizing - of trying to maintain some kind of procedure of recognizing people, and
when they’re recognized, insisting that they be recognized and so on. I mean it took
everything I had to run the meeting. I mean it was - it was a very difficult time.
Feelings were very strong, very high.
HS: Did you have tenure yet at that point? It’s close, but -
PR: Yeah, I believe - 1 believe I had tenure, yeah. I hadn’t been promoted yet, but I did have
- 1 think I had tenure. I think I had tenure. I don’t know when I got tenure. ‘63-’67 - 1
think probably I had been granted tenure that summer or the previous spring, yeah.
HS: Okay. Well, before we go -
PR: Okay, there’s just a couple of other things from that year before we hit the next year.
27
Were you going onto the next year?
HS: No, I didn’t want to go to the next year. I wanted to ask you, I’m - somehow I don’t
remember quite - I’ve recently read a lot about it, but why were the students being
arrested at this particular point in time? Was it - over the - there was a -
PR: Okay, there’s all kinds of -
HS: Is it the Nathan Hare -
PR: - yeah, okay, the George Murray thing is hot. He was an instructor in the - in the
English Department that also had been active, and he was also in the central committee of
the BSU and so on. And he was involved - or allegedly involved or whatever in the
Gator incident where some BSU students had visited the Gator office to protest and it
had turned into a fistfight. Accounts of that are blurred and mixed. I’m not going to get
into - but in any case, the trustees were pressing for Murray to be summarily dismissed
without any due process and so on. So we had due process issues going on. We also
had students occupying the administration building, primarily on war issues. That the
campus should be closed to address the Vietnam War issues and so on. It’s the first time
that we’re starting to get a mix of the war issues and BSU issues and so on.
HS: Okay. So all of this is -
PR: This is partly - yeah, so - so stuff is happening. The students do occupy the
administration building. There are arrests at the administration building. Terry
Hallinan gets clubbed when he goes to the aid of a - of a woman protester who is being
pushed around by the police and - there’s a lot of stuff like that happening.
One of the things that was - 1 carried a number of grievances for the union that year, and
that also turned out to be something that was very difficult. John Gerasi was an
instructor in the International Relations Department. One time, to prevent the
occupation of the administration building, they just locked it, okay. So the students
came up from the rally at the speaker’s platfonn, they march on the administration
building, and they get there and it’s locked. And Gerasi gets up and he makes a talk
about how this building belongs to you - you’re students of the State of California, we’re
taxpayers of the State of California, this is a public building, it belongs to the public and
the public has a right to enter it, okay.
And so they locked the building, but they left a window open. So Gerasi goes through
the window, okay. Now the widely reported story is that he broke the window in order
to get in. The actual facts - and I was there watching - is that he is somewhat
overweight, he’s out of shape, he gets a grip on the sill to try and pull himself in, and he
just doesn’t have the upper body strength and he’s flailing around and kicking and people
are trying to push him up through the window and so on. And his flailing body kicks out
28
a pane of window. But it wasn’t that he broke a window in order to get into the building.
Okay, so we’ve got Gerasi and he’s being subject to disciplinary action and so on and
he’s a member of the union and he asks for support from the union and so on. So I put
out a letter saying that you should know that one of our union members is being subject
to disciplinary procedure, and he has hired a private attorney to assist him in this, and if
any of you feel like giving him some money to support his defense, I just wanted you to
be aware of these facts and so on. And a lot of people got really angry that I sent that
mailing out.
Okay, there was another grievance - Dick Fitz -
HS: I was just going to ask you, is Gerasi a - like - what is his ranking in the
department?
PR: Okay, he’s a visiting lecturer in International Relations.
HS: Okay.
PR: Okay. But he’s been a Newsweek correspondent. He went from San Francisco State to
teach in - oh, was it in [Unintelligible] - anyway, it was one of the kind of revolutionary
French universities on the outskirts of Paris. He was there for some years. And then, I
don’t know, he’s been around and continues in radical circles to this day.
HS: Got it.
PR: So I thought that, you know, here we have a member and people should know that he’s
had to hire an attorney and they might want to make a contribution. They weren’t - 1
was pretty neutral because I realized that it was a touchy issue.
Another thing that came up was one of the faculty that got arrested in one of the student
occupations of the administration building was a guy named Dick Fitzgerald, who was an
instructor in the History Department. And some time after that he’s told that he’s not
going to be rehired. And he files a grievance. And, again, I offer him support. And
Bill Stanton offers to represent him in his grievance and so on. And I do think there was
something funny about that Fitzgerald case. I mean I think he was going to be rehired
and then he got arrested in the sit-in and he wasn’t, because when we got his records and
so on out of the files, it looked like dates had been changed and so on. There were these
erasures and stuff. So there was something - something funny about it, okay.
But anyway, I can remember I’m in my office with the mimeograph machine, and
DeVere Pentony comes charging in. He’s dean of the School of Social and Behavioral
Sciences, and the History Department is in that school. And he is just absolutely furious
at me. He says, “What do you think you’re doing?” He said, “I’m a founding member
29
of this union.” And he was. And Art - and I have a high opinion of DeVere, too, and
Art speaks very highly of him, how he could always - in his oral history, how he could
always count on DeVere. And he was a founding member of the union. But he became
a dean. And so I’m talking to DeVere and I’m saying, look, I don’t know who’s right
and so on. But in this situation, even though you’re a founding member of the union and
so on, you’re the employer and the union is going to take the employee’s side. And
we’re not going to decide whether we pursue this grievance on the basis of whether it’s
against a department that has a lot of union members or doesn’t, or it’s in a school where
the dean is a union member or has been a union member. We take the employee’s side.
It doesn’t mean that the employee has a good grievance, but we’re going to try and offer
him a grievance committee and someone to help him in the preparation of his grievance
and so on. That’s one of the services that a union does for a member. And it’s not
personal, you know.
And so I think that I, in some way, set the AFT back. I mean, we had the [abortive
strike, we had these grievances] - 1 mean what I want to do is put the whole damn system
on the nine-unit load and improve working conditions and do it on the job and so on.
I’m getting all this political stuff of having to deal with a strike over issues that aren’t
clearly union issues that we can’t pull off. I’ve got - arising out of the student unrest and
so on. Radical faculty getting busted and arrested as part of student protests, and I’m
having to offer them support in their grievance - oh, Juan Martinez, who was - who was
also a History - and this causes real problems. We had a lot of natural allies in History.
But we went out the next year, nobody from History went out except Lucille Birnbaum, I
think. But afterwards, in UPC, we had a run of three people straight that were presidents
from History, Illick, Cherney and Sally Scully. I mean the people are there, but as a
result of what’s happening and because of grievances coming up and stuff like that, we’re
getting some serious polarization that isn’t drawing the lines right, dammit, you know. I
mean we’re getting people on the - that should be on our side on the other side because of
stuff that’s happening over grievances.
The same thing happened in International Relations where we’ve got two of the - a strong
history of support for union activities and so on. Marshall Windmiller and Urban
Whitaker and others. I mean because I send out a mailing saying that Gerasi has hired a
lawyer to assist him in handling his grievance and if anybody wants to make a
contribution, this - this is how to do it. It’s taken - This is one reason why people say you
can’t have unions in higher education because there you sometimes act as an employer.
You promote, you make recommendations on promotion, on tenure, on things of this sort.
And then when the union comes in on the employee’s side - not necessarily saying that
that’s where the merit is, but just that’s where the assistance is offered - we don’t offer
assistance in the HRT committee. We offer assistance to the member even though the
HRT committee may be right, well then the guy will, you know, will lose. I mean we
just give him a grievance committee and a grievance advisor and so on.
But that lack of clear division between the bosses and the workers - 1 don’t think it should
30
mean the faculty can’t be unionized and benefit from unionization, but it is a problem that
does come up from time to time. And I think during the year that I was president of the
AFT, and also because I was relatively recent there on the faculty and now I’m going for
cases that involved people who have been there a long time and who have founded the
union and so on, that hurt us a bit in some cases, I know that it cost us natural allies just
because they felt the AFT had gone against their department. And so that was
unfortunate.
Okay, the main duty of a president of AFT is to get the next president -
HS: To recruit the next president?
PR: I was involved in the recruitment of Gary Hawkins to be the next AFT president. It
looked like - 1 mean we really thought that a lot of the student stuff had kind of settled
down. I told Gary that I - well, that my year had been really hell, but I thought his was
going to be not that difficult a year. I thought that we would be getting back to our
bread-and-butter union issues. The main action that we were planning was going to be
to try and do the nine -unit load thing and get people to sign pledges to teach just three
courses in the spring of ‘69 and so forth.
And Ha nk McGuckin and Art and others, I talked to him, and we were able to get Gary to
agree to be president of the union and he turned out to be magnificent in really difficult
times. I was thirty-six, I think he was thirty-one, and yet he turned out to have an ability
to [talk to] people in their fifties or something, seeing their whole career going down the
tubes and so on, to bolster them, to raise their moral and to make ‘em feel okay. I mean,
it was extraordinary. Anyway, that’s again getting ahead of the story so -
HS: Yeah -
PR: - but still, if you have questions, that’s - that basically has brought us to the end of my
presidency of the - of Local 1352. Gary Hawkins has been elected. He’s going to be
president for the next year.
HS: Okay, Lynn asked me to ask you about a couple of people, just maybe you could
say a little bit about them in the same way that you’ve talked about the strength of
Gary Hawkins, There’s Hank McGuckin and how he figures in. There’s the
name William Stanton I have to ask you a couple of -
PR: Yes, yes.
HS: - and how they kind of figure in. And then we’ll go on to the strike year.
PR: Okay. Hank McGuckin. He was a great AFT member. His father had been a Wobbly
and I had read Wobbly by Chaplin. But anyway, he had this labor background. He was
31
an extraordinary singer. And so he was a powerful voice, not only on the issues, but
literally in raising morale and the singing and so on. I’ve seen him at anti-war rallies
where you’re dealing with ten thousand or more people. He is a magnificent orator in
settings involving thousands and sending people out to do the collection and bringing in
thousands of dollars. So he was an important figure in the anti-war movement in the Bay
Area, speaking at huge, mass rallies and an absolutely solid member of the AFT and
striker.
Okay, Bill Stanton was - 1 have already mentioned that he defended Dick Fitzgerald. I
don’t quite know what Stanton’s background was, but for some reason he got fired at San
Jose State for doing something right - 1 mean on behalf of black students or something of
that sort. He got fired. Then he ran for the Assembly and he actually represented San
Jose District for about six years in the Assembly. And then he decided he couldn’t hack
politics anymore and he came to San Francisco State. He was an economist and he was
given an appointment in the Economics Department. And I regard him as extremely
bright, absolutely fearless, and always trying to up the ante a little bit. I mean he wanted
- 1 mean he wanted to see things done.
During the year of my presidency, he was very useful and would talk to me and buck me
up when I was down. And absolutely tremendous nerve. I remember one time
Summerskill had scheduled a press conference and he was going to come in and make a
statement about the difficulties on the campus and so on. And Stanton said, hey,
Summerskill ’s calling a press conference. We should go over there and have our own
press conference. So we walk over there and Stanton walks up and says, Summer - John
Summerskill ’s going to be along in a couple of minutes, but before he gets there I think
you should hear from Peter Radcliff. He’s president of the local AFT and what our take
is on these issues. And so, you know, there I am, there they are, cameras spinning. And
so I give the AFT line on it. So we hijacked Summerskill’s press conference. That’s
sort of my memory of Bill - of Bill Stanton, okay. [Laughing] We got a lot of cameras
there. Let’s go. [Laughing] So I just - 1 just really liked Bill.
The other person that had been fired at San Jose at that time was the staff person for the
college council, Bud Hutchinson, for whom I also have very high regard for, and they had
been fired together from the Economics Department at San Jose State. And Hutchinson
had been taken on by the College Council, and Stanton had become an assemblyman.
Okay, his big role in the story of the strike at San Francisco State is that he was one of the
key organizers of the non-union group that went out in November.
HS: This is Stanton?
PR: Bill Stanton, yeah. So that - but since we tend to end up focusing namely on the AFT
part of it - maybe - and we’re actually up to ‘68, ‘69, Bill Stanton got the Economics
Department to pass some motion in support of the student strike, and then that was
32
distributed to other departments and Philosophy supported it and so on. So he was a
prime mover of the - what was called the Ad Hoc Committee. The faculty that went out
prior to the AFT strike in support of the students who were on strike and - after it became
a union matter, an AFT matter, he was not - he was solid, but he was not in a position of
leadership anymore, but he was - during my year of the presidency his nerve and
willingness to take chances and so on was - 1 found very useful and supportive. I just
never really - 1 mean I - I’ll never forget hijacking the press conference.
HS: Yeah -
PR: [Laughing] I mean I - 1 will say that, I would not have walked in there on my own and
said I’m president of the AFT and I have a few things I want to tell you before
Summerskill gets here. But after Bill Stanton stood up and said we have the president of
the AFT here and he has a few words, I thought - I’d better say a few words. [Laughing]
HS: Yeah, that’s nice -
PR: So he’s - and he - you know, he’d been in politics and he was very smart and he knew
and he thought the whole system was rotten, and a lot of stuff was rotten. He was a -
you know, God, he had to be in his low fifties, maybe high forties, I don’t know. But -
he seemed a lot older than me. I’m at thirty-six, thirty-seven, I don’t know. But as
angry as the kids and with a lot more understanding and so on behind his anger and of the
way the legislature worked. I mean he told me once you got to sell out to somebody.
The whole thing’s crooked. He said at least I sold out to the right people.
HS: [Laughing]
PR: You know - 1 mean, you know, he’s bitter. Bitter. Angry man. But very bright. And
very daring.
HS: That’s nicely put, actually, [Laughing] Got to sell out to somebody, but at least I
sold out to the right people.
PR: Yeah.
HS: I’m going to try to remember that.
She’d also - Lynn also - there’s the people she’d basically mentioned. I mean - but
I noticed Williams was important early on. Did you have much thing with him? I
know he died fairly young, as I recall.
PR: Oh, yeah.
HS: I mean, can you kind of paint the same picture of -
33
PR: Sure.
HS: - him as you did -
PR: Yeah, Herb Williams is one of our -
HS: - for Stanton -
PR: - yeah, Herb Williams is one of our most effective liaisons with labor. He had served on
the labor council and he was just well-connected with labor. The other thing was that he
was very involved in making sure that our union did its political work. I can remember
going with Herb Williams to work in Willie Brown’s [campaign for the State Assembly]
- 1 think he lost the first time he ran, but then the second time he won. Herb got together
a AFT delegation and we walked in and Herb Williams says, “We’re from AFT 1352 out
of San Francisco State and we want to know what we can do to help Willie Brown.”
And so we went around checking the polls to see who’d voted and then going out and
hanging stuff on doorknobs and so on. So he was very active in always maintaining our
labor relations and our political relations, and very effective at it. As I said, he was card
one. He founded [AFT local 1352] with Art. He was not as often in the public eye as
Art, but very - was very important.
And he did die young because of a terrible mistake in connection with a heart surgery that
was being done. And they had taken him to the best place, Stanford, and they just
messed up and used the wrong blood or something of that sort, and -
HS: Contamination -
PR: During my presidency, I don’t know that he was on the executive committee. I don’t
have any clear vignette -type takes on Herb during my presidency. During the strike, he
was not on the negotiating committee or on the executive committee. He spoke at
meetings. I don’t have a vivid picture. All I remember is going in a car with him when
Pete Lee got appointed to the Board of Trustees - he was the labor representative - two
birds with one stone. He’s a black guy and he’s also representative to labor on the board
of trustees, Pete Lee. Going with Herb Williams. I think when I was president he
wanted to make sure that I met Pete Lee, so we went over to the East Bay and Pete Lee
took us to a soul food place and we sat around and talked. And I talked to him about the
nine -unit load and some of the concerns I had as president of an AFT local. And I
remember Herb Williams was instrumental in setting up the meeting with Pete Lee.
HS: That’s good.
PR: - more would come back. But, you know, he was the guy - he - Art also, but both - both
Herb and Art were really plugged into the political labor sort of thing. And - and we got
34
tremendous support from locals and I know that Herb Williams was involved with some
of that. He knew the head of the painters really well. The painters were in our picket
line during the strike year and so on. I mean he - he was - he was - he was one of the
main labor connections in the union. He started it and he had been involved in it for a
long time. And he knew a lot of people in the labor movement.
HS: Okay. We’re getting a little bit short of tape. I’m - 1 think we’re going to call this
the end of the side. Call this the end of the side.
[End of Tape 2 -Side 3]
[Begin Tape 2 - Side 4]
HS: Side 4.
While we’re doing this, maybe we should also - maybe you can just kind of
characterize Eric as well at this point, since Lynn asked for - you know, the same
kind of kind thumbnail sketch.
PR: Yeah, sure. Eric was a very powerful influence in the AFT. As I indicated, he was
president the year before I was president. I was heavily involved in the AFT in doing a
lot of distributing and things of that sort. Working - working very closely with him,
again pushing primarily the bread-and-butter issues. During the strike, Eric was elected
- he was not on the initial recommendation for the negotiating committee - to the
negotiating committee by the membership. There was three, Hank McGuckin, Eric
Solomon and Fred Thalheimer were not originally recommended for the negotiating
committee by the executive committee, and they were elected by the membership to the
negotiating committee. So that was a crucial position during the strike.
More important, I’d say, with respect to Eric’s role during the strike [was his role at 19th
and Holloway] - 1 was on the negotiating committee; it was soon discovered that a lot of
the time being on the negotiating committee is not where you want certain of your people
given their skills. So while I was on the negotiating committee, I was just called in at
certain times. Most of the time I was up at the headquarters and functioning kind of as
the office manager of the headquarters, doing the paper and so on. And where Eric was
a lot of the time was kind of a release from the negotiating committee duty to work the
19th and Holloway picket spot ‘cause that was where things were toughest. We had
faculty pickets at all the entrances. And the reason we started out 24-hour picketing so
that deliveries couldn’t be made at night and so on. I mean we did a traditional strike
with all entrances to the campus manned by pickets. But the students maintained a
public presence at 19th and Holloway, so there was mass picketing there and troubles
would arise because we were supposed to have separation between pickets so people
could walk through the line if they wanted to come on campus. And students would try
35
to tighten up the line and we burned out some people on - on 19th and Holloway. It was
dealing with the students and trying to keep the line moving and dealing with the police
who would [back off] as long as the line obeyed the rules, but then sometimes they’d
make arrests in the lines if there were warrants from elsewhere. I mean that was a really
tough place to be.
And Eric ended up spending a great deal of time at 19th and Holloway and had the ability
to deal with students, faculty, and police. And that was a position that was
extraordinarily difficult.
HS: There was -
PR: We’re probably going to come to some - some stuff. I mean, he was in the group that
was more student issues than bread-and-butter issues and so on. I mean there are some
divisions and so on in the union of that sort that are a difficulty for us, but [that] basically
was managed and resolved. So I plan to talk about some of those -
HS: Okay, sure -
PR: - so let me just say then that I think that the most [vivid] vignette of somebody during the
strike would be Eric at 19th and Holloway.
HS: Okay, While we’re on that, there seems to be a theme - as I recall I think it’s from
Art’s oral history - that there was kind of an arrangement made, that the cops
would lay off the faculty? As long as they were at 19th and Holloway they wouldn’t
get arrested? There seemed to have been an arrangement made of some sort. I
don’t know - now -
PR: That’s a standard arrangement in San Francisco that police don’t club legitimate
AFL/CIO sanctioned picket lines, so that’s a standard arrangement. The difficulty was
that ours - we had all kinds of community supporters, students and so on, so that
sometimes our lines looked like they might not be a legitimate AFL/CIO picket lines in
terms of spacing and conduct and so on. So as long as long as we ran our picket lines a
certain way, we were not interfered with. I mean, that just isn’t done in San Francisco.
And we had the understanding that as long as we conducted ourselves as labor pickets are
expected to conduct themselves, there would not be problems and difficulties.
Before all that - That was after we had sanction. Before sanction the union started doing
informational picketing and certainly after we had sanction, as long as our lines were
conforming, there was no [violence]. Basically we stopped the clubbing and the
bloodshed on that campus. That’s something that we should probably come to. I mean
HS: Yeah, we’ll come to it a little bit later. Sanction means sanction by the labor
36
council by the way.
PR: Yeah, right.
HS: And that’s for somebody who’s twenty-five years old, listening to this in thirty years
PR: Yeah, okay.
HS: The context. Okay. Why don’t we then - we’ve covered some of this, why don’t
we go on there to - officially in a sense - to the strike year ‘68, ‘69.
PR: Right.
HS: And maybe I - I actually wanted to ask you about this. And as a preface to it, you
know, this is kind of a broad question in a sense, even - with you I’m hesitant to use
a philosophical question, but -
PR: Yeah.
HS: - you know, it had occurred to me as a lay person in philosophy, anyway, that - it
has kind of a philosophical sensibility to it. What was it about? Was it about
bread-and-butter? Or was it about the student strike support? I mean, you know,
basically Eric Solomon is arguing in his oral history that this is really about the
supporting of the student strike, and that the bread-and-butter issues is used as a
cover to get labor council sanction. That the real issue was supporting the student
strike. Bierman seems to be of the sensibility that there’s a terrific desire to help
the students, but we also had serious bread-and-butter grievances. And I’m trying
to figure out myself, you know - what is your take on it?
PR: Yeah, I think it was both. I mean I went out in November 6th, with the Ad Hoc
Committee. The Ad Hoc Committee was supporting at least dealing with the students
and their issues and implementing and so on. I mean, so in everybody that went out with
the Ad Hoc Committee subsequently struck with the AFT except one person. I know of
only one person that struck with the Ad Hoc, but then when it became organized sanction
strike, didn’t strike.
HS: Who’s that? That’s interesting.
PR: Jim Royce in the Philosophy Department. Struck with the Ad Hoc Committee, but then
he did not strike with the [union],
HS: How come?
37
PR: I don’t know. It’s always puzzled me. I just don’t know. And there may have been
others, but I mean that’s just one person. But it was unusual. So there was a large
group who had been out for a time and had been out for the students and -
HS: This is - you’re calling - this is the Ad Hoc Committee?
PR: Yeah. And that was their main issue. But I mean we were trying run - okay, there’s all
this other stuff going on. We were threatened with lay-offs, we were threatened with
disciplinary procedures that had been arbitrarily passed, we were - we were threatened
with people that were on a nine-unit load, having their pay docked. We were trying to
run - we were trying to run a nine -unit campaign during all of this and so on. So I mean,
it’s not like suddenly there’s these students doing this thing. I mean that’s part of the
point I was making before. We had been at trustee meetings with signs. We’d almost
pulled a strike the year before. I mean to see the faculty at San Francisco State - the
AFT faculty at San Francisco State with signs, they’re striking and so on, I mean, we’d
been in the news for a solid year as having all kinds of beefs and issues.
And so one of the main issues in our demand was that the student - student issues be
resolved and implemented. We didn’t say that we agree with the student demands or
anything. We just said that the issues with the students should be resolved and then
implemented. If they need money, if they need positions and things of that sort, then
that should - and that was - that was certainly a leading demand. But I don’t think the
other stuff - in order to get labor - labor sanction, we did need to have those other issues.
And I was one of the prime people in making sure that was in our paper and when we
called meetings that these were our issues and so on. But those had been issues that I’d
been identified with for a long time. And they were important issues to me.
On the other hand, it wasn’t like I just got involved in the strike when we had those issues
on a piece of paper. I’d been out with the Ad Hoc Committee, and so had a lot of other
people because we did think that it was important to do something about -
HS: Were you, yourself, on strike with the Ad Hoc Committee?
PR: Oh, yeah. Oh, in fact - okay, one of the things that’s going on here is before - when the
BSU issues, their strike demands, we managed - and I was involved in it to get a meeting
of the executive committee, the AFT, and we passed a kind of motion that was very
supportive of the students. Again, it was more considering resolve and so on rather than
we’d back these demands or identify with these demands and so on. So - but then there
was a long hiatus before the AFT came into it and that’s - that’s something that I can say
something about too.
The other thing was that throughout our strike - okay, it was like a scab that was
constantly being picked at. You haven’t endorsed the student demands. Okay. Now a
lot of the leadership of the student strike are actually members of the AFT union because
38
they are instructors or lecturers. So like like Alexis and the BSU. Varnardo. These
are members of the union. And so they’re attending the meetings as union members and
- and with a vote. Plus, there’s the Solomon, McGuckin, Thalheimer, McDermid group
that think that the important thing is - the only important thing in this is the students and
their demands, and so they’re always kind of picking away at that. Okay. So about
halfway through the strike, there’s this big emotional meeting at the Buchanan YMCA.
If early on you tried this, God, it wouldn’t of - it wouldn’t have flown at all. A lot of our
faculty said something’s got to be done about the students and if they can get anything
then, of course, it can’t just be on paper. It has to be implemented. But, God, some of
these demands are absolutely crazy. George Murray should have due process, then hang
‘em. He punched somebody, you know, but he should have due process.
And open admissions. I mean, my God, we can’t have open admissions at San Francisco
State. In fact, at that time, I think the University of Kansas did have open admissions.
Any high school graduate could attend. The retention rate was about twenty-five - the
graduation rate was about twenty-five or thirty-five percent. And CUNY, the city
university system in New York would go to open admissions and admittedly with mixed
results in a couple of years and so on. But almost all faculty - and I probably did too -
have some reservations about nit-picking or this or that about some of the student
demands. So you couldn’t get - you couldn’t have gotten a faculty vote in support of the
- of the student demands early on in the - in the strike.
But one of the things that people learned in the strike was that you can’t write your own
demands, that not every word, or comma, is going to be where you want it, and so forth.
So at an extraordinary emotional meeting that I don’t think is mentioned by either Eric or
by Art - 1 think it’s all right to mention it now -
HS: By the way -
PR: - that at a Buchanan -
HS: Now is this after the AFT is actually on strike?
PR: Oh, yeah. This is - the AFT strikers were there and a running sore has been, if you like,
kind of the division between those who say we should have backed the student demands
instead of this term of Art, deal with and implement, or whatever it is, okay. So
somebody moves. It was back to the student demands, okay. This is at an AFT meeting
at the Buchanan Y. And we do. And then everybody feels better. But also, everybody
agrees that we can’t say a thing about this. I mean, God, I mean, a negotiating
committee, keeping it - the inside of that, is hard enough. So now we’ve got a meeting
that’s relatively open, with hundreds of people there, and they’ve all done something that
can really screw them up. I mean, because the labor council could easily lift sanction if
we turned it into just a student - support of the student demands and so on. We still have
our other demands there, but if we change that kind of comprise work of art, the language
39
of that. So we never changed our paper, or anything, but -
HS: Okay, right.
PR: - but as a kind of catharsis, the - the group did - did back the - the student demands. That
may have been a factor, too, in making it difficult to go back, that we did take this - have
this emotional meeting where everybody said I just don’t want them dealt with, and
implement - the students dealt with and implemented. I back what the students are
doing.
So we did have a meeting at which we did that. And we also agreed that that wasn’t
something that we wanted in the papers or on TV and so on. And the students - there
were students there and they never went running to the press and said, hey, the faculty
now back our demands and so on. It was - so why did they do it -
HS: That’s incredible -
PR: But it was a pretty open meeting, you know. And yet we - we did have this meeting
where we kind of emotionally resolved what - what had been bothering a lot of people.
HS: For the record, maybe - see if I understand this. That at that point, with labor
council sanction, it would have been very difficult to officially go to labor council
now and say we’re adding - change what you guys agreed to?
PR: You don’t do that.
HS: Yeah, right. Right.
PR: It sounded like it was extraordinarily dumb, but it was also sort of healing -
HS: Yeah, it’s really - it’s quite extraordinary that it didn’t get leaked to the Chronicle.
PR: Yeah. I mean, that it didn’t - that it didn’t get blown up in the papers or something of
this sort. I mean, it was - anyway, that did - that did happen. So you’re right, that was -
there were some people that thought the main - the main thing was the students. And
that was a main thing. And - and the students, they did have to - then the students made
it difficult, you know, non-negotiable and we don’t and so on. You know, it’s a little
hard to sit down and so on. But - but, you know, it turned out the students could be
reasonable. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here today. I mean, that’s -
HS: That’s amazing. That’s amazing.
PR: They let us off the hook so we could go back. I mean, ‘cause there was this commitment
to the students and that was finally made in a - in a kind of direct, straight-forward way,
40
okay. But that didn’t mean that - that - we also were concerned about the hundred and
forty layoffs and so forth and so on. And -
HS: And all the rest, right --
PR: Yeah, and all this other stuff were serious and important concerns. And the student issue
was important and it was recognized in a way by labor, but it was recognized under the -
the cover of a working condition grievance that we just - unless they do meet with the
students and deal with the students and implement and so on, we have unsafe working
conditions. And we did.
HS: Yeah, that’s a good argument. That’s a nice argument.
PR: So - but it would have been impossible to get that kind of support for the student
demands early - early on. And even the - the Ad Hoc Committee, I don’t think, had a
direct endorsement of the - of the student demands. That would have -
HS: - interesting -
PR: Again, that was - would not have been something that they would have been able to pass,
I think, at that time.
HS: Well, okay, what was then the basis of the Ad Hoc Committee’s striking?
PR: Close - [laughing] one of the original Ad Hoc Committee’s signs. They’re not - they’re
not - this is just a piece of paper, eleven inches by eight-and-a-half. It’s red paper with
hand-lettering on it. Faculty strike for campus autonomy. Due process and free speech.
I mean those are apple pie and motherhood and so on. But - and there was a little - about
a one-foot stick like a foot ruler on it. These are about the smallest signs I’ve ever seen -
seen carried. And these are the signs that the Ad Hoc Committee carried, and it carried
between the students and the police.
HS: Wow.
PR: And they were -
HS: It’s red -
PR: - they were big signs that day because - my view is that that intervention by the faculty.
So the Ad Hoc Committee fought primarily as peacemakers, as trying to secure an
atmosphere on campus in which there could be serious discussion of the student
demands, stop the violence and so on.
HS: Okay. This is a little technical question. There’s a reference to the - to the Fac
41
Squad versus the Tac Squad -
PR: Yeah, I wanted to deal with that because I read one of the transcripts and the questioners
says, oh, so the faculty were the Tac Squad. No. The faculty were not the Tac Squad.
The Tac Squad were a special unit of the police were dealing with these kinds of crowd
situations and so on. But the faculty - some of ‘em started called themselves the Fac
Squad and that’s F-A-C, and they were going up against the Tac Squad. So here’s the
Tac Squad, one foot away, just itching to use their club. And here’s the Fac Squad with
their little red signs, eleven by eight- and-a-half. And behind ‘em, hundreds and
hundreds of students. The first - the first three rows, generally students that are just
standing there in silent protest, but three rows back you’ve got the rock throwers and so
on and so on.
I mean, I was - 1 was just terrified, some of the - particularly - one time there was a small
group of police that got isolated and this huge number of students and - and the Fac
Squad or the Ad Hoc Committee went between the police and the students. Some of the
students, three rows back, throwing rocks, got angry that we were, you know, stopping -
stopping a revolutionary action and so forth. But there were guns drawn. This
particular unit managed to keep their guns holstered, but guns were drawn on that
campus. If you see the pictures from that time, you see the - the copious bleeding from
head clubbings and so on. You see a dramatic picture of some guy from the ecumenical
house, a dog collar and so on, even the chokehold. I mean, just a - a minister, an
observer, trying to help diffuse the situation and he’s - he’s in a baton chokehold and so
on.
HS: How did you guys -
PR: Okay, everything - everybody agreed that the campus should be shut down except the
trustees and Hayakawa who said he would keep it open if he had to use tanks and so forth
and so on. But, you know, basically everybody - everybody said that the campus should
be closed. The radical students, white and the BSU and Third World Liberation Front
were saying the campus should be closed. And the faculty were saying that the campus
is being closed. And then it turned out that the city thought - 1 mean Alioto was getting
police intelligence and knew that the potential for bloodshed and killing and not just
blood. Blood was being shed. That the potential for death was there on that campus
and that the campus should be closed. Smith was fired as president because he wanted
to close the campus and have a convocation or try and get a grip on what was going on,
and he was fired because he refused to - because he wanted to close the campus. So that
was the reason for firing him.
So everybody, [all these people] it turned out [wanted the campus closed]. So we found
out that the AFT in some ways may have been used - we were charged with using the
students. Well, we may have been used by the city authorities and so on as a way to get
a grip on the situation there. But from our point of view, that isn’t the way we thought
42
of it. When we had a meeting with representatives of the mayor and so on and found out
that basically we could probably expect support and that if we did a conventional strike
that would [mean] we weren’t going to be clubbed or hurt, that there was a strong
likelihood that we would be able to get support for a conventional strike and so on.
I mean our view was - now everybody wants the campus closed. The students were
threatening to put us up against the wall and shoot us if we didn’t get out there and do a
strike and shut the campus. [Laughing] So Art - 1 can remember when Art and I left that
meeting with the mayor’s committee - we had to go over to Van Bourg’s office and we
were kind of walking down that street and jumping four feet in the air saying, you know,
God, we’re going to do it, you know. We’re going to pull this off. Because everybody
agrees, except the trustees and Hayakawa, that that campus should be closed. We’ve got
it - We’ve got - The students want us to do it, and now it turns out that we’re going to be
able to get support too - the mayor wants us to do it. I think we’ll be able to - it looks
like we’ll be able to do it.
HS: Let me ask you one thing. Earlier on, when you were with the Ad Hoc - you know,
this is before we get some action from the council - how did you and your Ad Hoc
Committee, without basically the police agreeing to lay off you guys, because you
weren’t yet an AF of L outfit sanctioned on strike - how did you get - when you
managed to do so, how did you get the cops to - you know, to lay back and not - not
just beat you guys up?
PR: Well, some faculty did get beaten up. George Price in English got really whacked and
beaten up. On this particular occasion, when we went - 1 mean, we were a diffusing
element. I mean, we had basically let the police escape from being overwhelmed by,
you know, a thousand students or something that were prepared to fight the - the police.
So in that case the police weren’t going to - you know -
HS: You were -
PR: - but we also - yeah, you know, we were also protecting the students because if they did
that, they were - some of ‘em were going to get shot and so on, which was an acceptable
cost of doing revolution for some of the students, you know. It was -
So one thing that we should talk about is - is bringing the Ad Hoc Faculty Committee
strike to the AFT. That turned out to be kind of a tricky sort of thing.
HS: Okay.
PR: Okay, from the very beginning I think that this is - unlike the previous year where it was
a little unclear to me why this was a union strike - 1 thought we had our issues and I also
thought that I couldn’t be asked as a union teacher to teach in the circumstances there.
That we had a clear working conditions grievance, given the state of it. So right from
43
the start I thought this is a union strike, this is an AFT strike. We did get a resolution
through the executive committee, and then the union never met, okay. What happened
was the Ad Hoc Committee came in and it started its action. Gary Hawkins is president
of the AFT and he is active in the Ad Hoc Committee, but he isn’t one of the initiators of
it. I mean, Speech fell in, Philosophy fell in. It was basically started in Economics by
Stanton, okay.
Art, sometime during this period, is gone for - for six to ten days. I’m not sure. He’s
giving lectures down in Florida. So he’s [off campus] when some of this stuff happens,
he’s not on - on campus for about - just a short period. Maybe seven days, eight days, I
don’t know. But stuff is happening so - so fast. So Art’s away. I’m calling John
Sperling, who’s president of the college council, almost every day. He wants to know
what’s going on at San Francisco. And I say, well, I think this is going to be an AFT
strike and I’m trying to bring the strike to the AFT, but Gary won’t call a membership
meeting at the moment because he doesn’t think that this is the time. He thinks this is a
student thing, we’re supporting the students, and he doesn’t see this as an AFT matter yet,
okay. So I’m talking almost every day to - John Sperling, president of the college
council.
Art gets back from Florida and he sees that we’ve got all kinds of non- AFT members that
are very concerned and so forth and so on. So he becomes a key member of a group - 1
think it was called FORCE or something of that sort -
HS: Called what?
PR: I think it was called FORCE. I forget what the acronym is - whoops! Excuse me - 1
forget what the acronym stood for - so his idea is that we want to have kind of a popular
front. We’re going to get all kinds of other faculty that aren’t union into this and so we
want to make sure we’ve got all of this worked out before we have a union meeting. I’m
not so sure - and even if we are going to do that. I say, well, fine, you know. I still
think that as a union we ought to take a position on this, you know. And maybe what
we’ll do is back FORCE, okay. And maybe - But I still think that it’s not right, and
particularly because we’ve got so many AFT members involved here that I think that we
should have a union meeting so the membership can discuss this as an AFT. So right
from day one, I’m arguing that we have to have a union meeting. We’ve already had an
executive committee meeting and we got a resolution through, and I’m arguing that
we’ve got to have a union meeting to let the membership talk about this. And Gary has
dug in - 1 think at one time he even said, when he finally agreed to let me issue a meeting
call that he tried to keep the union out of it but he just didn’t see any alternatives, okay.
So basically -
HS: And what does Art feel?
PR: And Art feels - 1 don’t know. And he’s working with FORCE. I mean he certainly
44
thinks it’s going to come to the union and so on, but he doesn’t - he doesn’t want it to
come prematurely. I’m gung ho. And I’m talking to Sperling, and Sperling’s gung ho
and so on. I mean why isn’t AFT in this? What are you guys doing down there? I say
I’m trying to get a meeting, but there’s resistance to having an AFT meeting.
Okay, so Gary - so the Ad Hoc Committee - the thing that triggers it is Smith gets fired
and the Ad Hoc Committee is meeting, and the word comes in that Hayakawa has been
made president. Everybody starts hollering, strike, strike, strike, and so on. And then
we go over to the Gallery Lounge, which is behind the cafeteria, which was a kind of a
meeting place on campus. And the Ad Hoc Committee is going to try to organize this
strike. And we’d break up into little groups, everybody goes over in a corner to talk
about how it should be done or what their contribution is going to be and so on. And I
think I called for an AFT corner or something of that sort.
Well, anyway, the whole think kind of disintegrates. People start disappearing. They
don’t come up with ideas. And the breaking up into small groups is a bad idea and Gary
- and Gary Hawkins comes over and he says, all right, Peter, call the meeting, okay.
[Laughing] See, remember, I’ve still got the mimeograph machine. I’m putting out all
the paper for the Ad Hoc Committee. I’m the guy with the mimeograph machine.
Here’s an Ad Hoc Committee [piece that I ran] - as I told you, I gave all my stuff to the
Labor Archives except some of this - I’ve got a few pieces, some of which are kind of
interesting that I ran - so here’s a piece of paper that I ran on the - the AFT machine.
The AFT’s machine is turning out all the paper for these people, and I’m running all the
paper for the Ad Hoc Committee.
So anyway, Gary says, okay, call the meeting. So this is a copy of the meeting call I
typed out. This is a copy of the call for the first meeting of the AFT in connection with
the strike. It lists three alternatives. One is a set of demands that are supposed to be
sufficiently labor oriented to get us strike sanction - prevent a cut-back of faculty
positions and even - you know, what they were promising to the black students is going
to be taken out of other places, so we didn’t put down to gain those new positions so the
black - they should be funded rather than taken from elsewhere and so on. And here’s
our work of art and sure implementation of any BSU and TLF demands that are agreed to
by the faculty and so on. Later we changed the wording on that deal with it and so on.
So the three choices at that meeting -
HS: I’ve got to change the tape -
PR: Yeah, okay.
[End of Tape 2 -Side 4]
[Begin Tape 3 - Side 5]
45
HS: Side 5.
Okay.
PR: Okay, so Gary Hawkins had said that we can call a membership meeting. So I went and
drafted a meeting call. Basically there were three alternatives, that we’d refuse to
cooperate with Hayakawa because of the irregularities in his appointment, or that we’d
endorse the positions of FORCE, which was the umbrella group that Art was organizing,
or the AFT issue to its membership, the following strike call to protect jobs, to create
jobs, to preserve and so on and so on. And then with the list of - of demands underneath
that, okay. And this had to be gotten out. I don’t know, I just had a few days to get this
out to the membership. We arranged to have the meeting at the Methodist church up at
the intersection of 19th and Holloway, okay. So -
HS: The meeting was what, December 3rd?
PR: December 3rd, yeah. Okay, so I’d bring this home, okay. And I’d tell my wife we’ve
got to get this out. And so she and I start doing the addressing. I’ve got my six-year-
old daughter and my eight-year-old son, and they’re folding and stuffing envelopes, okay.
And as soon as we’d get them all done and stamped and everything and I’m going to run
them down to Rincon so they’d go in the mail, okay. And then something really freaky
happened. I’ve got all this paper lying around the house and somehow my kids get hold
of this Ad Hoc thing and they’re putting that in the envelopes. They’re both yellow.
They’re both the same size. And so somehow I discover that they’re putting this thing in
rather than a strike call because it’s sitting around, it looks very similar and I’m, you
know, pressing six and eight-year-olds into service, and I’m just reaching the end of my
tether. I’m exhausted. I think, oh my God, we’re going to have to open every envelope
and go through them.
And then we discover that the blocks of print are different, and that by holding the
envelopes up to the lamp, we could candle them at the lamp and we could see which ones
have the strike call and which ones don’t. They’re folded up, which ones don’t have the
large letters at the bottom. So I’m sitting here candling them. And it turns out that it
had just started. There are only about fifteen or twenty that we had to readdress. And
then I’m off to Rincon and put ‘em all in the mail and we get the strike call off. And that
strike call went out from this table. My wife and I are sitting here addressing and
stamping and my kids are on the floor folding and stuffing envelopes. And we get the
strike call out -
HS: That’s a nice story, by the way.
PR: - in the -
HS: Very nice.
46
PR: Well, as a kid I grew up - my father had a mimeograph machine and ran the church
bulletin and newsletters, and I grew up folding and stuffing. So I think it’s an
appropriate -
HS: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely -
PR: - function for kids and so on. Yeah, but I can just remember my absolute - 1 was just
exhausted. I mean, you know - and then discovering that we maybe had screwed up the
whole mailing. But it turned out not to be as bad as I thought.
Okay, so we had that meeting and the exact numbers are there. But it’s pretty
overwhelming, a vote for the AFT to seek strike sanction. And so we do. We also sign
up all kinds of new members because the Hayakawa appointment has just absolutely
infuriated people so Art is able to bring most of the FORCE group to the meeting. In
addition to mailing our members, we got this - we’ve circulated the strike call as widely -
We made sure that every member was mailed, but we also circulated the strike call as
widely as we could. And we gave ‘em cards as they came in the door and said if you
want to vote in this meeting, you’ve got to sign a card.
HS: Okay, Very important issue now is - is George Johns -
PR: Yes.
HS: - and before we do that - okay, so the question comes up of getting labor council
sanction.
PR: Yeah. So - actually the strike vote, as I recall, didn’t involve a specific set of grievances.
I mean, there were suggestions and this - basically we went for the third alternative there,
that either refuse to cooperate with Hayakawa or endorse and combine with force, or call
an AFT strike and seek - seek sanction.
So Art and I went down to see George Johns and he met with us and -
HS: And he’s the head of the labor council in San Francisco?
PR: Yeah, he’s the head of the labor council. And he said that he thought our demands
needed a little bit of work, as I recall. I mean he said - he looked at ‘em and he said,
yeah, well, I can work with this, he said, but I think we need to do a bit more on these -
on these demands, okay. And my recollection is - 1 saw in Art’s oral account that we
went to Victor Van Bourg’s house and worked on ‘em. My recollection is that we went
George Johns’ house ‘cause we went up - we went up to San Rafael in Marin County.
And I don’t know if Van Bourg was there part of the time or not. He may have been.
I’m not sure. But I remember that Art and I were kind of put over in a comer and given
47
7-Up and so forth and worked on the demands.
And actually it was just - and I think this offended some people - mainly language
changes. I mean the demands that we started out with on work load and we have
something about grievance here and so on and so on. Almost all the substance of what
we had on this original strike were in the demands. But the wording was changed, and
sure implementation of any demands that are agreed to by the faculty and administers of
this college and so forth and so on. I think it was dealt with and implement or something
of this sort. I mean, there was - there were some language changes.
And I know - 1 think we made it very clear that there was a working conditions grievance.
That was brought out much more strongly. I’m sorry, I don’t have a copy -
HS: That’s okay,
PR: - of the demands that we ended up with there. They were widely circulated and so on.
But - so there was some work done on the demands to make them more palatable.
George Johns himself didn’t seem to have that much problem with ‘em, but he said let’s
put some of this a little differently maybe, you know, so -
HS: So instead of supporting the students, you’re trying to get working conditions that
are safe?
PR: Yeah -
HS: You mean that kind of thing?
PR: Yeah, that sort of - yeah. But we still did it - we still did have, as a demand, that the
students be dealt with and anything that was agreed to be implemented. Yeah. But we
didn’t say that - what was to be given to them or anything of that sort or how much or
anything of that sort. So there was distance there. But there was distance all along in
the Ad Hoc Committee. The Ad Hoc Committee was close the campus for peace and to
deal with the situation. The Ad Hoc Committee - although some members totally
supported the student demands, the Ad Hoc Committee - 1 mean, this wasn’t sort of like -
well, then when the AFT got it they put a labor front on it and the student demands kind
of disappeared a bit. I mean that - that was running right through the - the Ad Hoc
Committee, too, had the same kind of division between people that totally were
committed to and supported the student demands and faculty that supported doing
something about the student demands and implementing any that were granted or
portions of them that were granted and so on. So that was - that division was not new to
the - when the AFT came in.
HS: Okay,
48
PR: And so eventually we had a set of demands that - that looked okay. These were
approved by the - 1 don’t know if we went back to a meeting with them or not ‘cause we
had been given carte blanche to kind of go get strike sanction if we could, and we hadn’t
departed that far from what the membership had seen. I mean it was pretty much just
wording changes and so on. And there was a meeting of the labor council called. And
Art says quite a bit about this in his oral history. I don’t think I’ll repeat that. I mean
there were some difficulties because the labor leaders identified very strongly with San
Francisco State. Some of ‘em had kids or grandkids there and they didn’t want to see
that place closed. That was their kids ticket to better things and - and some of the TV
portrayals of what was going on in that - on that campus suggested that - they didn’t have
anything to do with it and so on. But despite that, sanction was granted.
HS: Can I ask you - before you -
PR: Yeah -
HS: - what is Van Bourg’s role in all of this at this point? Do you -
PR: Oh, he’s a very skilled labor attorney. Both he and Stu Weinberg. And he is attending
some meetings from this point on anyway. He wasn’t at the meeting at the Methodist
church, but - but now that - now that it’s reaching this sort of point, we’re making use of
him. He’s very skillful and he’s going to have a very big role with the negotiating
committee so he’ll often be making the statements for the negotiating committee after a
negotiating session and so on. He will [present] because they’ve got counsel there.
They’ve got Epstein, the general counsel for the trustees, so we got counsel there. And
sometimes our counsel will think it’s better that he make the statement after a negotiating
session, than we make it. And so he’s - he’s an effective voice for us.
Although Gary Hawkins was extraordinarily good. I mean he was basically our public
face for the strike. We’re very good about that. People were - if they came up to you in
line and wanted to get a statement from me, you would say, well, would you talk to Gary
about that and he’ll tell you what our position is on this and so on. So - and as I said, my
primary function was to run the office. We put out a fantastic amount of literature and in
theory, and to some extent in practice, I cleared everything because we were trying to -
and this is going out all over the country, so we did ask people to make changes and
things that they wanted to circulate, and so on. That’s one of the main things I want to
talk about because that’s why most of the strike I was in the office. One of the things that
happened in here sometime was that while the Trustees wouldn’t let Smith close the
campus and so forth and so on, they let Hayakawa close the campus. So he did close the
campus early. I forget how many weeks. Maybe a couple of weeks or three weeks
early or something. So this was a period during which negotiations were going on and -
and so forth. So our strike would have been sooner except for Hayakawa closing the
campus. So in the end, even Hayakawa wanted the campus closed. And he didn’t want
us to close it, I guess. So we got sanction. We have negotiations. The report on the
49
negotiations committee is negative. We’re not getting any place and so on. And so we
vow to go on - on strike and do go out.
A figure that’s not mentioned, I think, very much by either Art mentions him just once,
and I don’t recall Eric mentioning him at all, although Eric knew him from Ohio State, is
John Sperling. I have mentioned John Sperling. I was talking to him every day because
I was, right from the start, trying to make it an AFT strike or at least have a meeting of
the union and so on. I thought that we should have not let the union meeting go so long.
Tactically it may have been good that we didn’t take it over, but, you know, we — I think,
we should have been meeting sooner. I saw it as a labor issue from the start, and I was
talking to Sperling regularly. And Sperling — we didn’t have money as a local because
of the per cap system in labor and because we were associated into a college council. So
we were sending money to the national AFT and to CFT and most of our money went to
the college council, so we didn’t have a lot of money. Even to buy a mimeograph
machine, you know, that was a big expenditure that I had to argue for that we should
have our own mimeograph machine.
Well, John Sperling had money. And he rented us the strike headquarters up on - the
extension of 19th, past Holloway. So when we meet him on the first day of the strike,
he’s there with some kind of a truck or something. He’s got it filled up with walkie-
talkies so that every picket captain can have a walkie-talkie and communicate with other
picket lines. He says, Peter, come on up. I’ve got you a headquarters. I want you to
see it. And we go up there and he’s rented what used to be a dry cleaners or something.
And so we got money. The initial kind of money that - and he says the phones will be in
within an hour and so on, and we had about four or five lines in there and so on. So John
Sperling, you know, on the kind of nuts and bolts, or what we used to call - that worked
in the office - the soft underbelly, and something that I had always been interested, get
the machines, have control over stuff, be able to do it right away, all that stuff, Sperling
was extraordinarily helpful on that and recognized the need right from the start. I mean,
you guys have to have a headquarters, you got to have phone lines, you gotta - this is big.
You gotta - you know. And he was very helpful in - in getting that for us.
And then we did our own stuff. John Irwin from Sociology came in there with about
four or five guys and they just put up shelves and this and that. And we got desks and
sofas and chairs and so on appeared and some students brought in radio equipment that
enabled us to monitor all police calls and so on so we knew what was going on. And we
had this big antenna coming off of this - this place. And from my perspective, instead of
having to go out now and get stencils cut at a - at a copy place or something of that sort,
Sperling bought us a Gestifax so we could just do a paste up right there and run it through
it. And those things are expensive. Now they have these machines that’s all part of it
and - you know. But at that time, that was a big expensive machine that you only found
in shops and you went in there and had your stencil cut and then took it back and ran it.
So - Local 61 loaned us folders and they also - if we got backlogged, we’d run stuff on
their machines and so on.
50
So in terms of that side of the - of the operation, John Sperling should be mentioned and
the college council and our sister local, the K to 12 local, the city local 61. And Jim
Ballard was just really supportive on helping us do our literature and mailing and things
of that sort. They were really great about it, the support that they gave us.
HS: Excellent you bring those things in.
PR: I think Seldon did come out - to my knowledge, we had a big influx of money the year
before. We had the national organizers. We did not have national organizers working
in this - in this strike to support it. It was basically the sort of stuff that the organizers
would be doing we did our - we did ourselves.
HS: Now this Seldon is the president of the AFT?
PR: Yeah.
HS: It’s not Dave. Not Dave. Not Dave Selden?
PR: The - no, no, Dave Selden, the head of the AFT -
HS: The AFT?
PR: - yeah, New York. Yeah. Yeah, I believe he did come out.
HS: How is his name spelled?
PR: E-s - S-e-I-d-e-n.
HS: Selden, okay.
PR: Dave Selden, yeah. I believe he did come out. The main support that we got - we got
support from AFT locals throughout the Bay Area. Very strong support. San Jose AFT
tried a sympathy strike, but they only took thirty people and that was more of a problem
than - than a help. But they got back okay basically. We did get some money
contributions from other college locals that would do fundraisers for us and so on, but not
a great deal. We raised a tremendous amount of money. Art, in his oral history, talks
about the Mandor ad with coupons and so on, but we also did mailings. We had a huge
speaker operation where we’d send speakers just about everywhere.
I have a friend who was chair of a neighborhood association the last couple of years and
she was cleaning out their files to pass ‘em on to the next one, and back there in the
sixties, in their file, there was a letter from us. So apparently we sent out a notice to
every neighborhood organization in San Francisco giving our side of the story.
51
Faculty wrote - faculty members that they knew all around the country and sent our
packet and tried to get motions and resolutions or fundraisers done, and we raised a good
deal of money. We did give strike benefits that were not large. But off of money that we
had raised we were able to give strike benefits. Mailing lists appeared. Don’t ask. I
don’t know how we got ‘em or where they came from. I’m not quite sure. Maybe the
nation subscription list. I’m not saying we had that. I’m just saying that we got - that
we got mailing lists and I don’t know how we got ‘em or where they came from, but we
put out a lot of mailings.
We were able to run that office in that way because two department secretaries went out
with us. And some places department secretaries run the place. At San Francisco State
nobody was running it so we - [laughing] - so we can’t say that department secretaries
were running it. But Priscilla Johnson in Philosophy came out and another school
Humanities secretary - and I’m just really embarrassed. That name should be put in
there because she was up there almost every day. And they were really good and could
help us on the mailings and the typing and the layout and so on. So we had two highly
skilled professional really dedicated department secretaries that helped us in
headquarters.
Plus, we had a number of members that were not able to do the picket line because of
physical disability. Anita Silvers was really great on - on phones and the speakers
program and on the fundraising and mailings. John Horowitz from Social Work
education helped on strike benefits. Dora Tashabani — I’ve got the membership list
here someplace but I - that won’t help me on the secretaries, but it will help me on - Dora
was one of the - we only had about three strikers from Biology, I think, and she was one
of the them and one that was not kept. We’re going to talk later - Dora Tachabana —
we’re going to talk later about reprisals of that sort. I think she was a clear case of that
sort of reprisal.
So we had a headquarters that really functioned and really spun. And that -
HS: Can I have the exact address of that headquarter?
PR: Oh, no, I - it should be on -
HS: Don’t worry about it -
PR: It should be on - certainly on some of our paper and our fundraising -
HS: It will be somewhere. It will be in the paper trail, yeah -
PR: It’s in -
52
HS: Don’t worry about it.
PR: It is in the -
HS: It’ll be a paper trail -
PR: It is in the paper trail. And we put out a [bulletin] anytime the negotiating committee
met, we got something out to the strikers. What was going on. We had a daily strike
bulletin. I think we got one out every day. After every meeting. I can remember
going back there and we would have the minutes of that meeting and any action taken,
we would have that mailed to everybody, partly to remind ‘em and also to show ‘em
we’re on top of stuff and so on. So I’d - you know, the meeting would end at 1 1 :30 or
12:30, it may have been, and we’d go out to the headquarters and we’d be working until
three in the morning and we’d have that stuff out. I mean, so it was extraordinary.
The only time that I wasn’t at the headquarters, I did work some weekends for the
longshoremen. They did put us on weekends down on the waterfront. That was quite
an interesting experience and I needed the money. Art said that that money was put in a
common pool. That was not so. That was for people who could do the work and
needed it - that went to you. It was not put back into the strike pool. People’s
economic situation was extremely varied. Some people had savings and had support.
They had working wives or whatever.
My own was desperate. I was a young assistant professor. I had - we had our third
child in September of that year. Daniel, the strike baby. We had a six-year-old and an
eight-year-old and my wife had just had a baby. She was not working. I had a
mortgage and a second mortgage and things were really tight and tough. There was real
financial pressure. I was saved one month by Jordon Churchil, who served on the
faculty committee along with Curt Aller - Curt Aller from Economics, these are people
that finally got in and did something about the student situation, which was really what
enabled us to go back and - Jordan just said what’s your mortgage payment, and he paid
it for me. I mean I’m really indebted to him for - he just picked it up for me one month,
you know. But - ‘cause he knew I was - 1 was hurting.
So there was tremendous economic pressure on some of us, less on others and so on. So
anyway, working on the waterfront was -
HS: Can you describe that -
PR: Yeah. The first day I went down there, we were unloading a boxcar, putting it on pallets
to be shipped to Australia, and I looked in the boxcar and these little cardboard cartons,
and I thought, hey, this isn’t going to be too bad a job. And they were tractor parts.
And, God, they were just so heavy I couldn’t believe it. And at the end of the day I had
to go back through the headquarters to see how things were going and run some stuff and
53
I can remember just walking in there and sitting down and I was just exhausted. I was
thirty-six or thirty-seven years old. I was a surfer and a body surfer and I was in pretty
good shape. So a lot of people in the union just couldn’t take the longshoremen up on it
because it was physically very demanding. So -
HS: Was this longshore work or warehouse work?
PR: We were working in the warehouses, unloading boxcars or - or the palletizing. Taking
stuff off of ships that would come and it would have to be broken down to go different
places. So we were taking stuff out of boxcars and putting it on pallets, or taking stuff
that was hauled out of ships and breaking it down onto - onto pallets to be put various
places.
The other episode I remember was loading a boxcar with coffee bags, which is
traditionally - the longshoremen have this hook that they carry in their pocket and so on,
and you work with another person on that. And it’s very fast and I was working with
this big black guy, big, burly - he wasn’t really ecstatic about having professors working
on the waterfront given what he was seeing on the TV and so on - so he really put it
through me because I had to work at his pace. So you pick up a bag and you’d swing it
into a certain position in the boxcar and then you’d pick up another. And you build one
layer across and then you’d build a second layer. But you put the first set of ‘em
vertically, and then in order to fill out the space, the last one you swing sideways and
that’s called steamboat. I can still remember that, you know, swing - you know, swing
together - swing together and they’d say “steamboat,” and you’d turn it and throw it into
the corner. And he really worked me hard for an hour or so. But I managed to hang in
there and - [laughing] - it was nice. And then he [said I had done okay] - you could tell
he had - he thought I was going to not be able to swing with him and I did and it was - it
was a nice occasion.
And the money - and the money was extraordinary, so -
HS: Do you remember his name at all?
PR: I don’t remember his name. But - so the local support was tremendous. We had people
from a lot of locals come in our picket line. Not just teachers. I mean I can remember
people from the - particularly the painters who were - but I don’t think - ‘cause my
memory is so weak on this, but - but - and, again, someone like Herb Williams would
have been just really very important in asking and arranging so that on certain occasions -
We also had a lot of community support although a lot of that was perhaps more drawn in
by the students. But then when the AFT went out, they - we also got that kind of support
from - from the community. So the strongest support was for our strike was in the Bay
Area and - and we did do fundraising nationwide and did have pretty successful
fundraising.
54
HS: Bierman says that you were involved with food forays.
PR: Oh, yeah, I saw that. I may have done some foraging, but I - 1 didn’t lead forays. I
didn’t have time to. There was somebody who did who was also a forager. I am and
was a forager. That was Jess Ritter. And I’m pretty sure that he’s confused the fact that
I did forage and had even talked to him about my philosophy about it at times, and the
fact that there was foraging being done. And Jess Ritter did forage and put on some
feeds. At one time I thought that you should not divorce yourself from the collection of
food and have other people do all your killing. And if you were going to be involved in
that, you should do some of it yourself.
So I - for years I did try to, at least one meal a week, be one that I captured. I didn’t
hunt. Oh, I did spear fish, which is kind of close to hunting, but I did fish and I clammed
and I musseled and I crabbed and all that sort of stuff, at least one and sometimes more.
And during this period, I may very well have - although I don’t think I had much time. I
mean, I just had almost no time. I had three kids at home and I wasn’t home much. I
mean, I just was really stretched by the demands of keeping the paper front going, which
I thought was very important. The fundraising and also the daily strike bulletins and
making sure that the results of meetings [reports] got to everybody whether they were at
the meeting or not. And so on. Okay.
HS: Yeah. You got - before we go on to this next one, there was some - I have a note
here. “Call a meeting with Hayakawa just before the strike.” Do you recall a
meeting with Hayakawa?
PR: Oh, yeah. And Art goes into that at great length. I don’t know that I have too much to
add to it except that it had some lasting repercussion for me.
I think this would have been in December after the campus had closed maybe, while we
were still trying to do negotiations or - maybe even before we got sanction and it was
helpful to us in getting sanction. But Bishop Hurley was on the mayor’s committee and
was - was trying to see if something could be done about the - the standoff. And I think
Haughton, who had come out as a mediator, had also recommended that this be done.
So the union sent two people and Hayakawa brought Frank Dollard and we were put in a
room by ourselves to see if we could work out our differences at all. Art and I had a
definite strategy. We were going to do our version of good professor, bad professor, and
he was going to be the good professor and I was going to be the bad professor. I was
supposed to set him up as a reasonable person, but I was also supposed to make it clear
how difficult it was for a reasonable faculty leader because of the [radicals]. So I was
basically playing Anatole Anton - or maybe myself. I mean, one of the younger faculty
that were more identified with the student demands and just really angry and so forth.
55
So we got in there and I just was hollering at Hayakawa why didn’t you do this, you
could do this, why don’t you - you got to listen to the students and so maybe you used to
listen to jazz music or - you know, what’s that got to do - you know - and so I guess it
worked fairly well. Hayakawa did say - as he was leaving he said, “Well, I didn’t expect
to discover this, but Art, you are a reasonable person and I think that you [and I can
talk.]” - negotiation was verboten for them, but I think he may even have used it - 1 think
you’re somebody that I can either negotiate with or talk with. [Laughing] “But he’s
crazy.” Or something he said about me. I’m certain that there were political reprisals -
my promotion was stopped.
I was recommended by the promotions committee, I was recommended by my
department, I was recommended by my dean, and so I thought, well, the rumor was that
Hayakawa never did anything, that Garrity did it all, you know, and that Hayakawa just
did what Garrity told ‘em to do. So I went in to see Garrity and said I want to find out
why I wasn’t promoted. You’re entitled to ask the reasons. And Garrity said, well, I
recommended for your promotion. And they should have because I had edited work, I
had two articles, I covered my ass on - on some of that. I had been on the academic
senate and he saird, you’ll have to talk to Hayakawa to find out why you weren’t
promoted. And I discovered in my file - 1 still have this letter that I wrote to Hayakawa
asking why I wasn’t promoted -
HS: What year -
PR: Yeah, it says January 26th, 1972 -
HS: Okay -
PR: - and asking for the reasons I grieved it. I was promoted the next year and then dropped
the grievance, although the - you know, the pay loss was there. So - and I thought I was
the only one that had been recommended through Garrity that hadn’t been promoted by -
I just heard a few weeks ago when we did something for the Holloway Historians, that
McGuckin also had been denied promotion despite being recommended by Garrity.
Okay. So I’m sure there were tenure cases that were of that sort, and that there was a - a
blacklist. Because I know I personally had all the normal recommendations that would
have insured promotion and it was just the personal intervention of Hayakawa or
someone that looked over stuff for him other than Garrity that pulled -
[End of Tape 3 -Side 5]
[Begin Tape 3 - Side 6]
HS: Six. Side Six.
56
Okay, so Hayakawa did not find you a reasonable sort.
PR: No, he didn’t. Art felt that the meeting was a big success. He was certain that - that
either the meeting had been observed or taped or listened to and that it really helped our
cause because Hayakawa is also not a reasonable sort. And I’m not going to add to Art’s
oral history, but Dollard kind of flipped out on us and Art says quite a bit about that in his
oral history, and I can confirm that he thought - that Dollard thought he was going to die
on the ramparts or something of that sort, and - for the cause and so forth. I mean it was
a - it was all pretty weird. But at the time people - yeah, there was an element of danger
and risk for people on both sides.
HS: Yeah, yeah -
PR: And it could work on people and unhinge ‘em a bit.
HS: Yeah. Now you just said that Hayakawa was -
PR: Oh, he wasn’t reasonable either -
HS: I wanted to make sure that you said that -
PR: - no, I mean, you know - yeah, I mean he - he declared Art to be reasonable. I wouldn’t
say that we would have declared - that Art would have declared him to be reasonable, no.
I mean, you know, he didn’t -
HS: Well, why did Art think it was a successful meeting? I mean -
PR: Because it showed that - that if it was observed or reported back to anybody, that we were
reasonable people. That Hayakawa’s chief assistant was off the wall and that Hayakawa
himself was - was not someone that should be respected or dealt with and so on.
HS: Yeah, okay -
PR: - that we came out looking - looking much better.
HS: Especially if this tape was played back to the trustees or something.
PR: No, maybe not the trustees. I think the labor council and - although I think it would have
been very damaging for Hayakawa with the trustees, but I don’t think that would - they
would ever - no, I mean I think this is - this is supposed to set us up with the mayor and
the mayor’s committee and so on.
HS: Okay. Okay -
57
PR: But I mean Art told me before we went in that this is going to be taped or - you know,
they’ll probably be taping or observing us even though it may not seem to be - but I don’t
know that that’s the whole - 1 don’t - 1 mean, I - I’m just a lot less conspiratorial about
that sort of thing so I - 1 don’t - 1 think it was just one of those things that you have to go
through, final chance, lock ‘em in a room and see if - not exactly locked, but just see if -
if you get them away from their followers and adherence and all that excitement, if
maybe something good can happen. Nothing good happened.
HS: [Laughing] Okay, Okay,
PR: But I do confirm that such a meeting definitely took place.
HS: Okay, Now you have a topic here, the AFT tactic and student tactics and the big
bust -
PR: Yeah, okay. Well, the students really wanted us to go out on strike. They wanted us to
go out sooner. They thought that it was foolish for us to worry about whether we had
sanction or not. So the BSU, the Third World Liberation Front, the white radicals,
everybody is urging us to go out on strike. And furthermore, one of the reasons they
want us to go out on strike is that they won’t get clubbed and battered and so forth and so
on. It’s as a protective thing.
They also want us to go out on strike because they haven’t really shut - they’ve disrupted
but they haven’t really shut the place down even though they’ve created a good working
conditions grievance because of the police response and - to what they’re doing and so
on. They’re still quite a few classes that are meeting and - and so forth. So they want
us to go out. And we do go out. And we’re damn effective. ‘Cause we’re not just
picketing up there at 19th and Holloway or running demonstrations and - we’re - we’re
picketing, we’re preventing any supplies, any towels going into the gym and so forth and
so on. And we’re picketing at every entrance to the campus and we’re picketing twenty-
four hours, and so sometimes students - enough students have joined the strike that it
hardly seems worthwhile for the professor to go in.
In other cases, students may very well have wanted to not join the strike and so on, but I
remember talking to one guy who was teaching a - we don’t have any large classes at
State, but he was a lecturer in music, and he was teaching some musical history course
that they taught in the auditorium. He walked out, he put down five or six hundred
students just like that, okay. Our figures were that we had that campus eighty percent
shut down. We ran a perimeter strike for any of our members to go on to that campus.
They were supposed to get a line pass, they were supposed to show it to the picket
captain at that station before they went through and so on. We did send observers in
with line passes to do systematic counts in buildings at key classroom hours.
I’m not saying that we had people in there every time and so on, but, you know, your
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main ten o’clock class - you know, the main class time. And our estimate was that only
twenty percent of classes were meeting on campus. Some were meeting off campus,
some had been given assignments. I mean I’m not saying that other stuff wasn’t being
done, I’m just saying that that campus was pretty effectively closed down. And that
was - So the only place left for student activity was the big mass picketing at 19th and
Holloway. And that would be maybe a couple of thousand, stretching way down 19th
Avenue in a big loop and coming back and so on. But all you did was - was walk. And
you couldn’t stop because if you stopped, then you violated the rules that were agreed to.
You had to keep moving, you had to have a certain space between you and so on.
So the student strike gained momentum as they brought the police on campus, as they got
themselves clubbed. And then they didn’t want to be clubbed and they wanted it closed
down, and it turned out to be like the genie. It didn’t work out that well for them. Now
it should have worked out well for reasons we will talk a bit more, that is, if you close the
campus, you think you’ve created a lot of pressure for getting your demands met. I have
that listed as something I want to talk about. Why the hell a successful strike doesn’t get
more of a - of a response. And that was a surprise to us. I think it was a surprise to the
students.
So basically we have shut the place down, but the students now can’t have massive
demonstrations or rallies. They can support the picketing, but that doesn’t give them
much chance of recruitment. And besides, they don’t have any students to try to recruit.
They’ve kind of hit a wall there because there aren’t any students coming on campus.
Or very few. And any student that’s coming on campus is in that twenty percent of
classes that are meeting is probably not going to be too recruitable. So they’re kind of -
they kind of have no place to go unless somebody sits down and starts talking to ‘em.
Of course, we don’t have any place to go either, unless somebody sits down and starts
talking to us. And that’s not happening. But we’re doing our thing and what everybody
wanted us to do and so on, so we’re - we can keep on doing that for a while, running our
picket and keeping the campus closed down. But we’re both kind of in the boat of
we’ve shut the campus together and that seemed to be what everybody wanted and we’ve
done it and now nothing is happening. So the students, to try and get some morale and
so on going, decide to hold a rally on the campus.
And they go in and they hold the rally and they are told to disperse, but it’s almost too
late for most of them. They’re encircled and the big bust takes place. That’s over four
hundred arrests, and now almost all student energy, and a hell of a lot of our energy, too,
is going into bailing students and faculty. Some faculty were caught in that bust. That,
again, is something that’s unclear to me. Some faculty said that they were authorized
observers. I don’t know if they had line passes or not. If you were an authorized
observer, you should have had a line pass issued by the union so that - some of the people
may have promoted themselves to that position or they may not have. I just don’t know
the history on that. But I know that there were more faculty busted than would ever
have been given line passes ‘cause we were - we were pretty tight about that. Observers
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to count classrooms. A couple of times we sent people in to attend academic senate
meetings to observe and vote and so forth. But it was a pretty disciplined sort of thing.
So we had some professors busted in that too. And some that were in there managed to
not get busted and get away. So - there was a tension -
HS: Were you there that day? What did you see?
PR: I don’t recall being there that day. I was at headquarters, working there, except if I was
called as a member of the negotiating committee because they thought for some reason
the full negotiating committee should be present, and that would happen from time to
time.
The other thing that I was called for was if we heard on the radio and so on that there was
going to be police pressure at 19th and Holloway, we would call - we would radio our
picket captains and say maintain your picket station, but send your picket captain to 19th
and Holloway - and any leadership that we could get, we would send to 19th and
Holloway. So I would - about the only times I went to 19th and Holloway was when the
police were on horseback and there was fear that they were going to charge our lines
because of the 19th and Holloway situation had gotten out of control and so on. So
basically I worked headquarters except when I was called to go someplace as a member
of the negotiating committee, or when I was supposed to go to 19th and Holloway
because trouble was expected there. I don’t know if I - 1 just don’t remember - 1 didn’t
go - 1 didn’t go on campus. I didn’t go down to look at it or anything of that sort
because, you know, I didn’t have a line pass and I hadn’t been requested by the union to
go there or anything of that sort.
And I don’t remember - you know, at 19th - nothing that happened at 19th and Holloway
- 1 mean we - we heard they were busting the students, and I think at that point I did go
down to 19th and Holloway, but I didn’t go on the campus. I just observed that they had
encircled the students - it’s so hard to tell ‘cause you see it on TV. You see all the still
pictures of it years later and did I actually see that or - yeah, I think so. I think I now
remember seeing this - the encirclement was there and how they were - they were taking
the students away and so on. Certainly we heard about it up at headquarters and I
believe I went - 1 believe I did go down. But I wasn’t - It was too bad -
So the students went back to a - to a tactic of the mass rally. They couldn’t have a mass
rally at 19th and Holloway. They went back to the speaker’s platform on an essentially
closed campus. And they didn’t ask for line passes [laughing] ‘cause it was their strike.
But we had line passes for faculty, but we didn’t [for students]. That was their decision.
And it just diverted energy and attention to other issues dealing with the - the mass bust.
HS: You mean like legal defense -
PR: Yeah, legal defense. Our fund - some of our fundraising now was focused on - on bail
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money and so on. Art couldn’t remember the name of the bail guy. It was Barrish —
Barrish Bail Bonds. I noticed it in his oral report he couldn’t remember who the bail guy
was. It was Barrish. And I do remember the Barrish phone number was - it was certainly
in conspicuous sight of our headquarters and there was a lot of activity with Barrish.
So that was - while originally the students thought it would be a great idea to have the
faculty strike, it turned out that that kind of strike made it difficult for them to maintain
momentum. And I think that was a totally unexpected result. But the only reason it
made it difficult was - the other topic that we should come to is we thought this
university’s important to this city. As I told you, we had trouble getting labor sanction
because of the importance of that university to the people of San Francisco. And we
closed that damn place down and we’re putting people’s future in jeopardy, which is a
terrible thing to do, but we thought the stakes justified it, and nobody’s doing a goddamn
thing about it, you know. You close a place down, well, of course, the trustees - that’s
what we discovered. We couldn’t bring any pressure on the trustees. They didn’t give
a damn. At one time they even talked about maybe the loyal faculty could be transferred
to other places and we’ll just close the place down, you know. That seemed to actually
have been a serious possibility for some trustees. They were not hurting economically.
We didn’t have economic pressure on ‘em so it - and so it just - here we do this great
thing. I mean it’s extraordinary with the number of faculty that we had. We increase
our numbers so we’re now about over four hundred actually sign cards, members, and we
close the place down. On strike, shut it down. And we did. Pretty much. And
nothing much happens. And it’s very hard to maintain momentum in a strike when
nothing much happens.
Now, the students - We had a resource that the students did not have to get stuff to
happen, okay. We had labor. And George Johns - Fortunately there had also been a
Trustee Committee appointed that was supposed to deal with the San Francisco situation.
So George Johns insisted that that trustee committee meet with these labor guys. That
was one time our negotiating committee was called down there. We didn’t actually go
into the meeting, but in case we needed to respond or talk to anyone we were kept outside
the meeting, okay. My recollection is that that was one of the few meetings at which
progress is made. You know why? They were afraid to walk out on these prestigious
labor leaders so they missed their dinner. We couldn’t bring any goddamn economic
pressure on them, but one time we made ‘em miss their dinner and they gave a bit, you
know.
HS: Amazing.
PR: So I think the students were for us because they and we thought that if we shut the place
down, that would create all kinds of pressure. And it did. And the labor movement
with the mayor, they wanted that place opened up, and they thought that there should be
discussion and reasonable movement on demands and so forth. What eventually
happened was that this faculty committee - Churchill was just amazed that nobody was
61
dealing with the students and Aller, so they did get permission to represent Hayakawa in
dealing with the students, so they started dealing with the students, labor started dealing
with the trustee committee and eventually we got enough movement on enough things
that the faculty was prepared to go back, the students had not settled at that time. I think
there should be more detailed discussion of the go-back vote and vis-a-vis the student
settlement. And then even if you like, the faculty settlement.
One thing was that there weren’t going to be these hundred and forty layoffs, and that’s
something that we claim we won. We did win it, but we paid for it. [Laughing] We were
out long enough, two months, that our salaries covered it just about.
HS: So literally you paid for it -
PR: - four hundred. Yeah, we literally paid for it, yeah [laughing]. That one they could give.
We’d already - So one that’s often cited as one of our victories but we paid for, or
bought, actually. But still, I mean - still, you know, it was a demand and - that it was
met. Yeah, so - so the fact that the strike was extraordinarily effective and we were
effective in our - in fundraising, we were effective in outreach to other unions and to
some community and neighborhood groups. And we did have a very reasonable TV
presence with Gary Hawkins, who was superb. Still we made Hayakawa a national
figure, we made him a hero, and he won the TV war - and we weren’t - For example, I
was there the day when he came out of the administration building and mounted the
sound truck. I was there at 19th and Holloway. I was standing up close to Kaye Boyle.
HS: This is December 2nd of -
PR: Yeah. So this - yeah -
HS: ‘69 -
PR: -yeah. Yeah, so this is before we’ve gone out on strike. Hayakawa — we’re going to
have our meeting, I guess, the meeting at the Methodist church is coming up that day or
the next day or -
HS: The next day, yeah -
PR: - next day or so on. And so we’re up there at 19th and Holloway. And Hayakawa
comes charging out of the administration building, he gets ahead of everybody else, and
he looks absolutely crazy. He’s got these blue armbands that he’s waving around. He
gets up to the sound truck and we thought, you know, that’s on public property and - you
know, what’s he going to do about that? And he tells them to stop and they don’t stop,
and then he climbs on top of the sound truck and he’s up there throwing these blue ribbon
things at people, that you’re supposed to wear, to people, and he looks like he’s almost
kind of frothing a little bit. And he’s just crazy and then they still haven’t stopped the
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sound so he yanks the wires out. Destruction of property. And we thought, oh, God,
this guy is finished. And instead - So if you were there, looking at it, I mean it looked
like this guy is out of control. Nobody can have any confidence in him. On TV, the
way it comes out, he looks absolutely feisty. This dowdy little guy, he gets up there, he
physically deals with the students by yanking the wires from their sound truck. He gets
in the face of the driver before he climbs up on the sound truck and so on.
One of the other things he did while he was up on this sound truck, he saw Kaye Boyle,
who’s quite tall, very striking, very famous writer in the creative department. And he
knows Kaye Boyle and he hollers out to Kaye Boyle, “Kaye Boyle, you’re fired.” Okay.
After the strike, we brought unprofessional conduct charges against Hayakawa —
actually I think the panel that heard them did vote in favor of the unprofessional conduct
charges, but somehow it never led [anywhere]. There was no remedy for his
unprofessional conduct. And I was a witness at that unprofessional conduct thing. And
what he swore was that he hadn’t said Kaye Boyle, you’re fired, he’d said, Kaye Boyle,
you’re a fool. And actually, in academic circles, I mean, you do call your colleagues
fools from time to time - [laughing].
HS: Sure -
PR: It borders - borders on the unprofessional, but it’s not quite sound truck justice. Top of
the sound truck justice. So anyway, he backed away and said that he never said that she
was fired, he only said she was a fool and - [laughing]. So, yeah, we made - we made
Hayakawa senator, it’s extraordinary. I mean that just really - the power of TV to
convey a certain thing.
We saw Reagan do the same thing with - with faculty at meetings. He was a master.
He’d start talking to the policemen at the door about these faculty members, you know,
just - who are here and what do you think about that. I mean, you do - and, you know -
Reagan was a master. I don’t think Hayakawa was that much of a master communicator
so much, but - as the feisty little man of action, climbing on that sound truck. That
shaped the image of the strike throughout the nation. It made him a hero it made him a
senator. And he came out of democratic roots, too, you know?
HS: Yeah, it’s odd, isn’t it? You know, you mentioned somewhere what - you know,
what the result was. On one level Bierman said that he thought that the strike was
won. Eric Solomon figured the strike was lost. They both present their
arguments. A lot of things that Bierman listed, you know, you can point at and say
- some of them were like - like what we - well, we didn’t achieve a negative so we
were - therefore we won. You know, we didn’t lose the positions. We didn’t all get
fired. So therefore we - you know, what is your take on -
PR: Yeah, I think that was really important. I mean the fact that we made credible the threat
of striking faculty. We did go out. We sustained what was the longest strike in higher
63
education at the time, two months. And on top of that, a lot of those strikers had been
out since November 6. I’d been out since November 6. We had a kind of resolve and
seriousness. We did take everybody back that we took out to the positions that they had
for the spring semester with one exception. That’s the story that ties into the go-back
vote and the rump group. So I’m going to leave [that], I think we should get back to
that.
HS: Okay, very good.
PR: Okay, on overall assessment, I - we did have one of the first schools of Ethnic Studies.
People said that they were prepared to grant that before. But I mean, I don’t know. A
lot of that stuff really did become real and become consolidated. And I think they did -
they were afraid to screw around or mess with it and so on. So I think we did - we did
do - do stuff there.
The other thing is I think it - it - the trustees would never use the tenn “negotiation.”
That was one reason why actually there was some difficulty because Johns would not
speak their language and they wouldn’t speak his, okay. But, in fact, they were forced to
recognize us. We were the only faculty group that was doing anything and they were
forced to deal with us beyond meet and confer. And I think that was important too, we
forced a kind of de facto dealing and recognition. And we’ve got collective bargaining
now. It hasn’t done what we’d hoped it would do. There have been some serious losses
with collective bargaining. I, myself, think that has a lot to do with the fact that the AFT
lost the election. I think that was really too bad. And I have views about why we lost
that election and I’m sorry we lost it. But - all we did - all we did -
HS: We’ll come to that a little bit later -
PR: So I don’t - 1 think, you know, you don’t get resounding victories in this sort of thing.
But if people say they lost, why are they so damned proud of their loss? I mean, you go
talk to Eric Solomon. That’s his finest hour. Okay, what’s fine about it? You lost,
Eric. You think losing that’s fine. He didn’t lose in some sense, you know. So the
people that say that we lost are proud of what they did. And I think - and I think that
they can’t have that kind of pride in what they did if it’s quite as big a loss as they claim
that it is.
HS: Huh -
PR: A loss would have been if we were all fired, we were all scattered, we’re all doing
different things and so on. A loss would have been if that campus is running at sixty or
seventy percent. That didn’t happen. That campus is running at twenty percent. That
campus was effectively shut down. But, you know -
HS: Very nice response. There was a - I had a question in reading through all of these
64
things - I think you’ve really answered this, but did some of the faculty - this is kind
of - can I take out something Eric said. He said that some people couldn’t decide
whether they were really on strike or whether they weren’t on strike. He said, you
know, they would teach classes off campus and so they were really not striking.
They were pretending that they were striking. I mean, there seemed to be a whole
question and Eric thought it was very important in his mind. What’s your take on
that? It sound - well -
PR: Yeah, urn -
HS: - and was that divisive or not?
PR: Yeah, well, when it was found out that some people were getting salaries, they were
forgiven. They weren’t kicked out of the union and Eric now says that that was our
biggest mistake. That we should have been more brutal. I also noticed that Eric said in
his personal statement that money was no problem for him and so on and so on. He had
a working wife who’s a doctor and so on. Some of our members were really pushed and
stretched financially, others weren’t.
Apparently it was possible, and some deans did encourage this, for you to turn in a note
saying that you were meeting your teaching responsibilities and then you would be paid.
And a few strikers did that. Other strikers certainly weren’t paid, but they did - were
concerned for their students and they did try to maintain some kind of assignments or
meeting of - and so forth. Everybody when they went back, went back de novo. That
meant that you went back as a new hire. So when we took people back, they went back
as a new hire. Later, we were reinstated and that meant that you got back your - that
your seniority and tenure and whatever you - 1 lost - in addition to not getting promoted, I
lost a sabbatical because I was due to go on sabbatical the next year but since I’d only
been teaching there for [laughing] four months rather than seven years, I lost my
sabbatical. I got that the next year when I’d been reinstated. So as part of that
reinstatement, you had to mock up a diary of what you’d been doing during the strike.
So everybody, in order to get reinstated, had to pretend that they had had some contact
with students or read a book or done something professional and so on. So everybody
had to turn in a diary of some sort that was part of the reinstatement procedure. So
everybody had to make some compromises.
In order to get reinstated, Van Bourg required that you submit to him a kind of diary of
your activities. I must say, in my own case, they were extraordinarily minimal, but, you
know - 1 can’t even remember what I said, you know. I wrote a paragraph on an article -
I read a paragraph in an article. I saw a student in the line and we talked, I don’t know.
Had an individual conference with somebody on - you know, but - but it was - my own
diary of activities was - was really minimal. So people had to make various kinds of
compromises.
65
So I’m much more tolerant and forgiving of people who felt - in fact, if I had known that
we could take their money and shut the place down, I would have urged that as a tactic.
I just didn’t have any idea that you could shut it - shut it down, withdraw your services
and still take their money. [Laughing] But that’s more my line, you know. Settle the
nine -unit load and so on. You know, that’s more my style. People viewed me as kind
of a bit of a trimmer or sharp, but I mean I don’t know. I mean I think if you can shut it
down, accomplish your aims and take their money, maybe that’s all right, you know.
So it’s just a difference in a sense of what’s appropriate and what’s okay. I think it may
be working here, but as I said, I know some of these people feel kind of, in a way, purer
than some others, but I believe that to do some things, you have to get your hands dirty,
and the fact that somebody’s hands may be a bit dirty, I’m not as judgmental about that,
maintaining a certain purity. And I think that everybody had to compromise in some
way. They couldn’t write their personal set of demands, they had to accept that either -
the demands that were agreed upon even though they might not agree with every little
thing. They had to in order to get reinstated, they had to construct a diary that showed
certain types of activities during the strike period and so on and so on.
HS: Okay, I guess what I’m asking beyond that is anything - was there anything at the
time that seemed divisive or weakening about that?
PR: Oh, the students seized upon it. They thought that nobody should teach classes off
campus and so on. The union’s view was that people were supposed to honor the picket
line, we’re going to close the place down and sort of what went on in your own home was
- that was your business. Now I can’t - 1 can’t remember if we were pressed into it - 1
just don’t remember if we were pressed into a vote on that or not, and if so, what the -
what the result of the vote was. It was not a big deal to me. It was a big deal to some
people and it was a big deal to the - to the students. But it - that didn’t have a real grip
on me as an issue, so I’m sorry, I just don’t remember exactly how that played out. We
did talk about it and - and I think we may actually have taken a vote - 1 think we may
have voted that people weren’t supposed to do this. But I think that was an area in
which people felt the union couldn’t tell ‘em what to do in their own living room.
HS: Okay -
PR: I’m not sure how that worked out.
HS: Okay, I do have a question - we’re getting a little short on tape. Did Louis
Heilbron, who’s a trustees president, and Von Bourg meet to try to settle the strike?
PR: Urn -
HS: Do you know about that or have you any take on that?
66
PR: No, I don’t - 1 don’t have any personal knowledge of that. I know all kinds of meetings
were taking place. Like I - we’ve mentioned that, you know, Art Bierman and I met
with off-record - with Hayakawa and Dollard and there was an off-record meeting with
the mayor’s committee and - so there were off-meeting records taking place and I think
Heilbron was very useful and he may very well have met with Van Bourg. I don’t know
if my - to my own knowledge of that and if I did know at one time, I’ve forgotten if
somebody said, well, you know, if Van Bourg mentioned that he’d had meetings with
Heilbron, I don’t know.
HS: Okay.
PR: It did turn out that that trustees’ committee was very useful and did agree to certain
things, and that that was part of our being able to go back.
HS: Okay -
PR: And whether - in addition to the trustees meeting with the labor committee and so on,
there was also meetings between Heilbron and our representative, I just don’t about that.
HS: Okay. Let’s call that the end of the side.
[End of Tape 3 -Side 6]
[Begin Tape 4 - Side 7]
HS: Side 7. I guess at this point the go-back vote -
PR: Yeah -
HS: - the day late rump group and Morgan Piney -
PR: Morgan Piney, yeah.
HS: Morgan Piney, yeah.
PR: Okay, so the negotiating committee, there was some movement on the grievance
procedure. There was movement on some of the other demands and so forth so - as a
result of the meeting with the trustees committee and the - the intervention of the labor
committee and so on. So the negotiating committee had to decide whether they were
going to recommend settlement to the union.
HS: Can I ask you a question at this point?
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PR: Yeah.
HS: At this point Solomon says that about this point, after the big bust, you know, the
resources are being taken over for legal defense of the students and so forth, and he
feels that that really busted the momentum to a great degree, and so it was - it
becomes sort of clear then almost every that, you know, we’re going to have to have
a settlement. Did you feel that way or not at this point?
PR: Oh, yeah. I felt that the students were hard- after the big bust, there’s hardly - we didn’t
have the massive picketing at 19th and Holloway. We still had faculty pickets at all
entrances. We never stopped or withdrew our picketing in any way. But the students -
you know, that was a big chunk of active students that got busted there and now suddenly
they’re having to make court appearances and so on and so on. So it definitely broke the
momentum of the students’ strike.
The faculty strike, we had the place effectively closed down and we’d shown, I thought,
tremendous staying power. But it also was becoming evident that we had - among other
things, we had a new semester coming up. This semester was ending. There were
issues about whether we’d issue grades for students and so on. I think the tactic
discussed was graduating students only. Their grades withheld until their settlement and
so on. I believe that we were trying to control registration for the spring semester to
make it difficult by making sure that all striker courses - get most of the students that we
could into striker courses, except in some cases I think they were going to put striking
students into certain professors courses and - so that, you know, we’re - so there’s a lot of
stuff going on. There’s a kind of a natural rhythm to academic life and we’ve got - not
only the strike’s been going on for two months, but the semester is closing and there’s
another semester and so there’s a lot of untidiness about the fall semester, about the
spring semester now, starting up in - and so on.
So, you know, what we needed was some - some agreements. We started to get some.
The negotiating committee had a really tight inside, but I don’t know. I guess it’s been a
good many years and Eric gets into it and he’s unclear. He says that - that his group was
voted against seven to four. He says it was McGuckin, Thalheimer, himself, and he said
I think Peter was with us, okay. Then on the fourth vote with the student oriented
faculty, okay. So that’s not quite correct. So maybe I - since it’s out, maybe I should
say something about it, okay.
The negotiating committee meets. Art and Gary have indicated that they will have told
George Johns and the labor council and so on that they will support this agreement and
they will be recommending to the negotiating committee that the negotiating committee
recommended to the membership that we go back, okay. We’re meeting there. The
negotiating committee has seven members, okay. Art and Gary have already said that
they’re supporting this, okay. And then Eric and Hank and Fred Thalheimer say that
they can’t recommend that we go back at this time because the student strike is still not
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settled. Okay, the third person - 1 think it was Mario DeAngeli. I can’t - 1 think - 1
think he was the - the seventh member of the committee besides me. We’ve mentioned
five of them now, okay. He says we got to go back - whoever it was, this person votes
with Art and so Gary and Art give a big sigh of relief, okay. I haven’t said anything yet.
But I mean I’m with Art and Gary. I mean the three of us have had our assignments, we
do our different things, we’ve worked tight together. Art says someplace in his personal
statement that I’m absolutely trustworthy and reliable. And I find myself saying I can’t
go back yet, and I don’t - you know, I didn’t really expect to see it. I said you haven’t
heard from me yet.
And I just, at that time, didn’t think we could go back yet. The student thing seemed too
unresolved. And I was kind of surprised to hear myself saying it. Okay, so we have a
four-three vote against recommending to go back, okay. I believe Art and Gary have to
report this to George Johns and say that they’re going to try again and so on. So they do
try again. I don’t know, three days, five days or whatever, on the swing vote. By that
time I think I’ve also talked to Churchill. I know there are some faculty that are trying to
do something for students. To me, it seems like the students, without changing their face
and so on, are recognizing that it’s okay for us to go back. My own situation is
personally financially desperate, you know. Sell out - I’m a swing vote and I switch.
Now we’re four-three, okay.
And we call a membership meeting and the negotiating committee is going to
recommend that we go back. My own personal feeling is that it was a stroke of luck that
we delayed that go-back vote - Eric in his oral statement makes it sound like the go-back
vote wasn’t tight. That was such a damn tight vote. And my own feeling is that if we’d
taken the vote to go back on a split negotiating committee recommendation, four to three,
when it was first raised, we would have lost that vote. But it wasn’t tactical or anything.
I didn’t think - 1 didn’t think, geez, we got to wait a week and then maybe we can win the
vote in a local. I - 1 don’t think we got enough votes in the local, we need to wait a
week. It was just that I somehow found myself not able to do it. And I was sort of
stunned and I know it had to be a shock to Art and Gary, although they never kind of
called me out on it, so we did vote again and we got the four-three vote, okay.
That go-back vote was extraordinary close because of the fact that the student strike had
not been resolved and Art -
HS: I remember it was very close. It was like - something like a hundred and twenty
versus a hundred and four. I forget the exact number -
PR: Something like that -
HS: It was something like that.
PR: Yeah, it was very close -
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HS: Pretty close.
PR: Okay, another thing was that - 1 didn’t do this phoning myself, but in order to vote at a
membership meeting, you had to be a member and that was the only requirement. We
did have members that didn’t strike for various reasons, but they were members of the
local and in some cases they had provided various kinds of service and intelligence to the
local without being on strike. And it was also known that these members, since they
weren’t on strike, and were concerned about the faculty that were on strike would vote
for go-back. So calls were made to these members and some of them did show up.
I don’t think they were decisive - with respect to the vote, but they may have been. I
doubt - 1 just don’t - 1 just don’t know. So we got up there and we recommended to [go
back]. Art and Gary made statements saying that a majority of the negotiating committee
was now recommending settlement. And some of the members were shouting no, no.
And they wanted to say - wanted to know how the vote was and so on. Okay. Well,
they knew that Art and Gary and D’Angeli or Ritter, I don’t know who, would have voted
to go back. And they wondered if one of their three people had. And also, me. So I
was called. I mean I can remember people calling, how did Peter vote and so on. Okay.
And I just felt totally red-faced and so on. And my recollection is I just stood up and
said I voted with the majority of the negotiating committee. And that’s all I said.
HS: That is real good. That’s really helpful. That’s very helpful.
PR: Okay, now - now - so we’re taking the vote. The vote is you go up - each person goes
up and they have their ballot and they put it in the ballot box, okay. Leo McClatchy,
who’d been a chair of the academic senate and a lawyer and he’s from a school of
business - he wasn’t a striker but he was a - a campus politician and so on. And he
belonged to all the organizations and he belonged to the AFT. He was there. And he
goes up to cast his vote and people are hollering, hey, McClatchy, you can’t vote, you
weren’t on strike, and so on. And my colleague, John Glanville, goes over and as
McClatchy’ s trying to drop the ballot in the box - an old-fashioned cardboard box with a
slit in it, you know - he grabs McClatchy’ s hand and John’s about six-four or something
and he holds McClatchy’s hand with the ballot over his head and he says, “Shame, Leo.
Shame, Leo. Shame, Leo.” And he just then stops and he’s just holding - and then
finally he takes his hand away from Leo. Leo puts his ballot in the box [and that’s it].
The vote was to go back. Okay.
This is a tight agreement. The agreement was that if we voted to go back, we had to go
back the next day. There wasn’t - So what happened was there was a rump group - now I
- I’m convinced in my own mind that if the majority had voted to stay out, I would have
stayed out. And so I - my view is that the rump group, when the vote was to go back,
that we should have maintained our solidarity and they should have gone back. We
should have all gone back. That was the vote.
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HS: It’s the usual union style too -
PR: Yes, that’s the way you do -
HS: - once the majority speaks -
PR: - that’s the way you do it in the union. And it had been hard to get a majority on the
negotiating committee, it was tight to get a majority in the union, but there was a rump
group. Eric was in the rump group and Hank McGuckin and Fred Thalheimer. Nancy
McDermid, who’s now dean of the School of Humanities was a prominent member of the
rump group. So they met the next day to discuss continuing the strike, okay. Students
were great. The BSU came. Same old argument that I heard years before considering
whether to sign a loyalty oath - we don’t want these faculty separated from the campus.
We want you to remain in your teaching positions on this campus. You go back. Well,
they would listen to the BSU, they wouldn’t listen to the majority of the union. So they
went back the second day. Unfortunately -
So everybody that had a job for the spring semester went back to that job. Okay. We’re
going to talk a little bit about reprisals and people - people had their job for that semester.
That didn’t mean too much in some cases except one person, Morgan Piney. Morgan
Piney was an openly gay guy from the School of Business. He was the only striker from
the School of Business. He went back a day late outside the agreement, okay, and so
they didn’t accept him back. And we weren’t able to get him back. The other people in
the rump group were - there was no protest launched by their deans or by their schools,
and so we were able to take them through the reinstatement procedures the same as the
people that had gone back inside the go-back agreement. Morgan Piney, we couldn’t -
we lost. Okay, we did give him a job.
While this was going on, we had this temporary rented headquarters, but we now decided
that we needed, again in terms of loss, we now decided we needed a permanent off-
campus headquarters so a group of faculty got together as a general partnership, and they
bought a house up there eight doors down from our strike headquarters up on 19th, and
that was our union headquarters. So we were the only local - 1 mean the college council
didn’t even have a headquarters or a house, but we had a house that we turned into a off-
campus local that functioned for a number of years until we went out of business and the
partners sold and I think realized some profit on their investment in the - in off-campus
house.
And Morgan Piney was made paid staff for the union. A position that he held at close to
what he’d been making as a lecturer in business, I think, and he became an AFT activist
and he’s the first person to openly raise the gay issues at the national convention. He
was sent back as a delegate of our local, organized the gay caucus for the national AFT
and stuff like that.
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HS: Interesting -
PR: And so - so Gary Hawkins couldn’t go back to teaching. He went back that semester but
it was - it was too much. He bought a motorcycle and rode it across the country. Went
into bicycling and reading Thoreau and simplifying and so on. He was just coming back
into academic life maybe fifteen years later. He was doing some lecturing at Sacramento
State in the Speech Department and he was going to teach a couple of courses at San
Francisco State. He was killed in a tragic boating accident. One guy who had worked
weekends at the waterfront with the longshoremen, and some of the guys down there
talked liked this was real life and real job and so on. God, I just wanted to get back in
the classroom and teach, you know. I thought it was really hard, dirty, dangerous work,
but one guy stayed on the waterfront and got a regular card -
HS: Who was this?
PR: I can’t remember his name. He was a lecturer, he didn’t have a solid situation at San
Francisco State.
Who else might I mention among the strikers in this kind of vignette? Oh, I know the
guy that should be mentioned. Who’s the guy that publishes Tikkun - Michael Lerner.
Michael Lerner. Michael Lerner was a graduate student in Berkeley in Philosophy and
we’d hired him to teach one course as a lecturer in the Philosophy Department at San
Francisco State. Well, he’d been in the free speech movement over there and so on. He
couldn’t be involved in the strike through January and so on because he wasn’t a member
of the faculty. But the last week of the strike was in the spring semester. So now he’s a
faculty member at San Francisco State. So he signs a union card, he comes to his first
union meeting - we’re in this go-back stuff and this kind of stuff - and this guy stands up
like he knows everything in the world and starts to tell everybody what they should be
doing and so on, and we’re saying I was in the free speech fight and this or that, and, you
know, these people had just been through two months - some of us almost four months of
striking, and, oh, God, we’re - and people are saying, “Who is this guy? We’ve never
seen him before.” They wonder if he’s some kind of provocateur. So somebody finally
says he’s a new lecturer in Philosophy and we’re just going, oh, God. But he was ours.
So, yeah - so Michael Lerner, the publisher - the editor of Tikkun, was in the strike for a
week at San Francisco State and had - had a lot to tell us about what to do too when he
came to his first union meeting. So - [laughing] - yeah, so, anyway, so we did - we did
get back.
With respect to what we’re talking about, my view is that I - 1 do want to say a little bit
about what happened after we went back with respect to strikers and then after that, you
might want to hear just a little bit about what happened to the AFT in California
statewide. I was involved in that history and I do have some things I can say about that.
72
But -
When we were out, departments didn’t matter and people formed life-long friendships at
their picket stations with people from other departments and so on. When we went back,
everything got completely departmentalized and we weren’t able to protect people very
well. We did carry grievances, okay. So there were eight people that didn’t have tenure
that were strikers in English. I think four of ‘em were kept, four weren’t. Well, you
know, that not everybody who’s non-tenured is going to get tenure. Furthennore, where
the ax dropped, [it] dropped in different places. Some people were tenninated at the
department level. Their department hiring and retention committee does not recommend
tenure for them, okay. Other people were recommended by the department, but not by
their dean. Other people were recommended through the dean, but then were
recommended again by Vice-President Garrity, which was uncommon, but would happen
before the strike in two or three cases where he thought he had infonnation that justified
his decision and so forth.
So the whole thing is completely messy. I mean most of these were grieved and they
were grieved unsuccessfully. We had one person who was denied tenure in philosophy,
and that was Anatole Anton. We had recommendations for him through the dean level,
and I’m not sure after that. I think probably - probably not. That turned out to be a
fourteen year struggle. He’s now chair of the Philosophy Department and we were able
to get him back. We had a window of opportunity. We had Nancy McDennid as dean
and we had Eric Solomon as acting provost and in that window of opportunity, somehow,
we were able to get Anatole reappointed. But we lost grievances - my grievance filed on
Anatole was about three feet long. We carried that grievance for years through different
kinds of things and different grievances and so forth, okay. But that was the department
defense essentially.
So the union was not effective. And in my own case, as I’ve mentioned, my promotion
was held up and I didn’t even know that McGuckin in Speech apparently had the same
thing happen to them. The cleanest cases are cases where you had recommendations
through the academic vice-president and then Hayakawa did something. How many
cases of that sort were, I don’t know. But a lot of other cases, we know that the person -
it was because they were a striker that they weren’t given tenure. But it may have been
done by their own department if they were isolated in that department or - all right, so
Dort Tachabani was in Biology. We had Ruth Dole and - oh, God, Duncan, and some
other strikers in Biology, but some were not a big group and it’s a big department and so
it - it was done at all kinds of different levels. It wasn’t done at one time because some
people wouldn’t have the tenure decision coming up for four years, and then the shoe
would drop and so on and so on.
I mean, so it just turned out to be extraordinarily difficult to deal with, and most of the
dealing with it devolved to departments and if you didn’t have support in the department,
then it came to the union and the union would appoint you a grievance committee and it
73
would take you through the grievance procedure and so on, but in academic life, if you
don’t have the support of your department and your dean, you know, it’s just - it’s not
going to happen. And furthermore, in some of those cases, the person would not have
made it.
HS: Yeah, so it’s difficult -
PR: And it’s hard - so it’s almost impossible to show political. You can show political for
Stanton, say, for Hare, probably Juan Martinez. You can show political for McGuckin
and myself in the promotion because that went through all normal levels and it’s
extraordinary when the academic vice-president is for you. I mean, that - for a president
to intervene at - at that point is extraordinary. And there were interventions at that point,
okay. So those are the cleanest cases, but -
HS: How about the Martinez case? You - I don’t remember if you talked about that
one.
PR: Yeah, I don’t remember how exactly that worked out. He did get rehired by
Summerskill and I’m not quite sure when he let go or - 1 mean, I was involved in his
grievance; I just don’t remember how that - Juan Martinez. Okay. So he was a member
of the [union] - this is the - the strike member - I’m looking at a list of members and this
would be the spring semester after the strike. Juan Martinez is listed as a member and so
he - he did go back that spring semester, but I think he was not rehired by Hayakawa for
the next semester. And I would say it’s fairly obvious that that was because of his - his
support of the Third World Liberation Front and their support of him and Stanton
certainly was a casualty.
HS: There was one argument that might have been by Bierman, but I’m not sure. The
dean on the strike in a couple of cases, like in the Philosophy Department could be
an advantage. A guy named Don -
PR: Provence -
HS: Provence -
PR: Yeah, that was Eric Solomon.
HS: Sorry, okay -
PR: What the hell does he know about granting tenure in the Philosophy Department? I
mean, I don’t know. My view - so Eric has raised - he said that - that Don was going to
be denied tenure before the strike and that - so that we did save some jobs because of the
solidarity and so on after the strike. He had been a striker and so he was given tenure so
that -
74
HS: Solidarity -
PR: - so that votes - that votes changed. The vote changed. There was a negative vote
before the strike and a positive vote after the strike. That’s not correct. But Eric did
pick up something and I don’t know how the hell he picked it up or that he should have,
you know. There shouldn’t have been any discussion of what went on in a faculty tenure
decision.
Don Provence was going to be granted tenure and the votes were there to grant him the
tenure, but that decision may have made some people in the department less than happy.
After the strike, it was a happy decision, but Don was going to get tenure. There was not
- the votes were there to give Provence tenure.
HS: Okay, okay -
PR: There wasn’t a negative - it wasn’t that there was a negative vote that was overturned for
a positive vote. There was a positive vote that became a more enthusiastic vote. Maybe
that might be a way of putting it.
HS: Okay, what about -
PR: And there certainly was a feeling of loyalty and support that was generated by the strike.
It’s just that as everything got departmentalized, it was difficult to do anything with it. I
mean, with respect to four years after the strike, someone has promotion problems.
Three years after the strike, there’s a tenure thing. In this case it’s at the department
level. I mean, it’s just - you know, it’s damn hard to do stuff. And sometimes it’s hard
to know what level things are happening at. Like I never knew that McGuckin had
promotion problems or that his were the same as mine at the - at the Hayakawa level and
past Garrity.
HS: Okay. Beyond what happens to individuals, is there a long-term impact on San
Francisco State on the faculty and on the school, even on the students, that you can -
even if it’s amorphous that you can describe?
PR: Well - Some relationships were sundered and maybe never not put back, and some people
that were strikers still would think - to this day would think less of some people that were
not strikers and that they thought ought to be and so on. It’s extraordinary how - how
long feelings of that sort can last. But, I mean, sometimes it got pretty rough out there,
you know. We had a guy come through our line and - with a - kind of a stick or cane or
something and slash one of our women pickets. And after the strike he was punched out
by a faculty member. Another faculty member got in a brawl with him and so on.
There was - One of the pickets got in a fight with a Phys. Ed guy who came down to try
and get the towels through when they had the truck stopped and so on, and they got into a
75
fight. So, I mean, you know, there’s - stuff like that was - was - was happening.
I mean we lost - we were going to have a really great student union [design] that was
turned on by the trustees, the -
HS: I’m looking for stuff like that, too -
PR: - money - money for the programs had been in the control of the students and the trustees
thought it was ridiculous to have - although the average age of our students, twenty-five,
at San Francisco State - to have students - it’s from their fees, to have students have their
own control of their own money raised by their own fees. So there were - there were
long run effects of that sort that were - that were not positive. So, you know -
HS: How about the long-term impact on the union?
PR: Well, I think that the strike at San Francisco State I think pushed for collective bargaining
and recognition and - and things of that sort. So it was good for collective bargaining.
Was it good for the AFT as the representative in collective bargaining? Well, that’s the
story that we’re coming to and I think there - it should have been, but it was misused or -
you know, the campaign was screwed.
HS: Okay,
PR: So, unless you think of - Oh one thing I was - in addition to going back, and maybe it is
having a change - This is sort of funny so I guess I should tell it. They had a retirement
dinner for me. I fully retired a year ago last January and they gave me a dinner, and I
had found some old stuff from the department minutes and so on right after the strike.
When we went back, we were determined not to have a chairperson in the department, so
we had a - 1 think - we didn’t say minister, we say coordinator of internal affairs, a
coordinator of external affairs and so on and so on. And then we had one position called
“the prodder” who was supposed to make sure that everybody did do their things and so
on. So we tried to run the department as a collective and without a chair. And the
university refused to go along with us and they’d always address something to the chair
and then it would be sent back and so we played those kinds of games with them.
And that actually ran for about two or three years until just in order to operate within the
system, they forced us back into having a - a chair. But - so [laughing] - but anyway, I -
I had the set of minutes from a department meeting and it listed all these really weird
sounding positions in the department that - that had different things to do.
Anything more about the strike -
HS: I think we’ve -
76
PR: Yeah, I think that’s probably as much as I can recall or say at this time.
HS: Okay,
PR: I think there was - they had some kind of stuff - 30- years and so on, student papers and
so on - the union itself had an honors banquet ten years after the strike in 1979, and I was
abroad that year. I was on sabbatical. But I do have the program. And there is a
couple things about it that are interesting. It does enforce the idea that - that jobs - you
know, traded around and after you’ve been president of the union, that didn’t mean that
you shouldn’t be something else in the union. And vice-president Art Bierman. So when
this is being held in 1979, [I] had been former president of the college council and
president of the local - he’s vice-president of the local.
HS: This is Art Bierman?
PR: Yeah, Art Bierman. Vice-president of the local, you know. No - as I’ll tell you, I
served as secretary and treasurer of the local and I mean - even though I’d been a
president, I mean I didn’t mean you didn’t do a lot of these other kinds of jobs. But
Willie Brown came and gave a talk at - at this. And George Johns came. And Victor
Van Bourg and Stuart Weinberger. So ten years later all these guys are coming to the
banquet, so, it was a famous defeat and the people kept in some ways returning to it as a
touchstone and something that should be talked about and remembered.
HS: Still being talked about.
PR: Yeah, still being talked about.
HS: Sometimes all day.
PR: I’ve never talked much about it. I’m amazed at how much I’ve got to say about it, but it
feels kind of good in a way to talk about it.
Okay, from 1969 on, I remained active in the AFT. I held various offices. I was
secretary a number of times. I was the last treasurer that they had when we ultimately
abandoned - in the last box that I gave to the archives, were the financial records of the
union, the three things I guess I want to address is, well, I was active in, and it was
successful, the campaign to merge the AFT with the Association of State College
Professors -
HS: Can we turn it over?
PR: Yeah.
HS: We’ll go into this one, but we’re - again we’re at the end of - we have always to be
77
the victim of our technology here.
[End of Tape 4 -Side 7]
[Begin Tape 4 - Side 8]
HS: Side 8.
Okay, so this is on to the merger that leads to the UPC in 1969, 1970.
PR: Okay. I don’t have a date on this thing that I’ve found. I - the merger was later than
that, but I’m not quite sure what the dates are, but they’re part of the record. And I think
this is a good thing to do. The ACSCP had been primarily an insurance organization,
but some of their staff had been fairly effective at trustee meetings. In fact, their
representative, a guy named Russ Cohn, was just [strong], the trustees just infuriated him.
I mean, he came - he came on really strong to the trustees whereas Bud Hutchinson, I
think was more effective with the trustees, but he had kind of a courtly, professorial
manner. He was representing the union and Cohen would be screaming at him and so
on. But he didn’t have any troops behind him.
But anyway, we did merge and this did bring in some faculty that [were] new. It made
us a larger and stronger organization.
HS: What was your role?
PR: On San Francisco State campus I was a member of the committee for - 1 guess we called
ourselves the San Francisco Joint Committee for an [New] Faculty Organization, and in
looking at this, there’s some strikers, but there are other people that were not strikers.
Kai Yu Shu was on the committee for Foreign Languages. That would be really getting
us into middle faculty. It would be very effective and - Newman Fisher in Mathematics,
he was active in [ACSCP]. So this was real kind of reaching out. And I don’t know how
many years this was after the strike - this is committee that’s about half strikers and half
non-strikers and we’re working pretty well together. And the number of delegates you
got to the founding convention depended on the number of your sign ups. And in order
for this to be triggered, you had to have a certain number of sign-ups statewide. And at
San Francisco State I think we - we ended up having about as many sign-ups as anybody.
We ran a pretty good sign-up campaign and turned in the cards.
And I went down there and - basically, though, it turned out to be an AFT takeover of
ACSCP. They had thought that their staff would be continued by the new organization.
That didn’t happen. But Hutchinson continued but Ross Cohn did not continue. That
caused some unhappiness. Who should be the new president? Sperling had been
president of the college council and he thought that he should be president of the new
organization. Everyone thought that was much too blatant to have - so that was yielded
78
on. But the guy who became president of UPC was Bill Smith, and he was AFT from
Pomona, Cal Poly Pomona.
So in terms of getting new membership and reaching into middle faculty, to some extent,
yes, but not as much as you might have expected because it turned out that the actual
marriage was - [laughing] kind of a shotgun marriage or something of that sort. But then
one of the conditions was disaffiliation because ACSCP was not affiliated with the labor
movement, but it was just understood that we would reaffiliate - we did reaffiliate with
the AFT within a few months. So United Professors of California, then AFT 1352, was
back in existence and it was now a - a local of United Professors of California, and it was
AFT affiliated. And this was the organization, UPC, which stood in the statewide
bargaining unit election against the California Faculty Association, which was a put-
together organization of the California State Employees Association, the AAUP, and the
education association people. The NEA, but I forget what their - what their - they didn’t
really have anything going. So it was mainly national. So what we had were national
organizers and money from those organizations that came out, and the campaign, we lost
it - Art says we lost by a hundred and eighty votes in his oral history - 1 thought the vote
was - 1 thought the vote was closer that than. I think the unit was ten thousand. I think
somewhat over five thousand faculty voted. I don’t know what the voting rate was.
And I thought that actually a swing of nine votes, I thought it was really tight, but I may
be wrong on that.
The one - okay, the really bad thing about this campaign was the UPC had difficulties,
okay. We seemed to have two factions. And one was - at this time, one was the
Biennan faction and the other was the Kessler faction. I thought this [did not have] had
any roots in the old left or something. It didn’t seem to. It just seemed to be a kind of a
personality conflict of some sort. Kessler would win and then Art would win the
statewide election for president of the - of the College Council of the UPC. And the year
that they had the election, Kessler was - was the statewide president -
HS: Where was Kessler from?
PR: Philosophy, once again. A lot of philosophers -
HS: Also SF State?
PR: No. Philosopher from Fresno State.
HS: Fresno - okay,
PR: Fresno State. He was a young guy. He used to seem to really have high regard for Art
and so on, but I think he felt that Art had dissed him at a meeting or something. Had cut
him a bit or something at a meeting. It seemed like it was personality.
79
Okay, so now here we’re in this statewide campaign. We’re up against a paper
organization that’s not a membership organization, but does have a lot of money and a lot
of organizers out there, and we do have some people that are worried about UPC as being
too radical and so on. Is it time to pull together? You want everybody in that damn
election. And what happened was they basically froze Art out of having any role in the
statewide election. And I think that was just a - a terrible thing to have done, given this
kind of founding role and the abilities that he’d exhibited over the years that he should
have been involved in the election campaign. He should have had some kind of a
position and responsibilities. Now I don’t know if that was on the advice or is this
ongoing -
[Phone ringing.]
Should we stop it?
HS: Why do you say they froze Art out - who’s they?
PR: Kessler. Kessler, yeah.
HS: How did he have such a big following?
PR: It was just - it was kind of a knife edge. But they - 1 mean Art had probably been
president a year or two before, and now Kessler was - was president. There was also a
kind of split between [lecturers and tenure track faculty] - Kessler had more of the
lecturer caucus and lecturer votes. I don’t know if that was on age or - or what. It
shouldn’t have been on the issues ‘cause we were - 1 mean, you know, I personally think
I was always good on the lecture issues and very strong on ‘em, and I thought Art had
been too, and so forth. So it’s a little hard to figure out. But in my view, that was just a
major - a major mistake. So Art didn’t have any role in that statewide campaign. I
worked very hard in the rank-and-file. I mean, Local 61, again, helped us out in that we
had phone banks set up down at Local 6 1 , and I went down and put in my hours on the
phone bank calling faculty and - particularly faculty that I thought - that I wanted to
make sure that they would be voting and did they have any questions or problems and
that sort of thing. So I went and put in hours on the phone lines and so on.
But the thing that was interesting, we only needed, I think, to run about three hundred
votes [beyond our membership]. If we had run three hundred votes beyond our
membership, I think we would have won the election. So we barely - we barely got our
membership. But we had to have run - you know, I don’t know how many votes we got
beyond our membership. We got some. I mean it wasn’t that polarized or knife-edged.
So I think we had some members of UPC that didn’t vote for - for representation, and I
think that had to do with some of these serious divisions.
HS: There was a three-way? You could vote for no representation or -
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PR: No, no. You voted - it was between the two organizations. They either didn’t - so I
think - but - so I think some UPC people sat it out. I don’t think they voted for the
opposition [union?].
HS: They just didn’t vote -
PR: I think some of them didn’t vote. I never asked them, but I kind of suspect certain
people, certain places, may have just not voted at all. And they would have voted - so
there was - there had been a pattern over a period of years of two sides, and UPC, and
one side getting a narrow win over the other side - in a kind of bouncing back and forth -
and that was not as it should have been healed for the election. [And that split should
have been healed for the election.] And I felt personally bitter about it ‘cause I’d put in
hundreds and hundreds of hours organizing for the AFT in California, and we should
have been together in that election and we should have won that election. And if we’d
won that election, I think that things would have turned out differently. I mean a lot of
stuff that’s bad has happened. We had this merit pay stuff where each year everybody
has to be evaluated and put in a fonn that they should be - so you have almost constant
review. It’s just time wasting and divisive and a lot of things happened.
So we lost by a few votes. I think a lot of that had to do by the fact that we didn’t pull
together, whether the national - which we had a bad history with the national. So all that
driving Caselli and Stubbs out of town and to the airport may have come back to haunt us
[a bit]. They may have - at one time they may have been trying to have a jackoff strike
at San Francisco State and get a change of leadership there or something. I mean - and
then we’d been - and Art was identified with the people that had struck at San Francisco
State on student issues, and by this time, we got Shanker back there now as president of
the AFT. And, God, he cost us a lot of problems organizing for the AFT - 1 mean the
NEA actually looked better on a lot of issues that appealed to our faculty at the university
level. So anyway, I don’t know.
But for all that, whatever you think of Shanker or the national, the group that was
progressive and that was more likely to be effective and do things in California was the
UPC. And we blew that damn election because we weren’t able to get ourselves
together for what we’d all been working for - for years. And we barely ran beyond what
our membership was in the vote. Okay.
Now some people argue that maybe it was a good thing because now we had as a
collective bargaining agent a group that would appeal to middle faculty or right faculty,
but that other wasn’t a membership group. The people that voted for them, it was - 1
think it was definitely an anti-AFT vote. They didn’t want collective bargaining. They
didn’t want to be represented and so they were voting for a group that couldn’t represent
them at all.
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Okay. I joined the CFA immediately because if they’re going to be my agent, I want to
have a vote and so forth and so on and pay ‘em dues. I also stayed a member of the
UPC. Within two or three years, CFA had been basically taken over by activists. I
mean any organization depends on its activists. They had the position. And so within
three years, when you start looking at the mastheads for local chapters of CFA, you’re
going to recognize most of the names of having been people who were activists in the
AFT and the UPC, okay. But we lost about three years there and they weren’t affiliated.
Eventually, through people like Tim Sampson they got a kind of backdoor affiliation with
labor, I think, through the SEIU and so on. Okay.
The other thing was that we had actually started to have some movement on stuff. We’d
- using the meet and confer before there was an actual representation election, we had
started meeting at the chancellor’s level instead of all this local stuff. And we found out
that if you want to have any influence, you don’t wait until stuff is done and comes out
and has been approved by the legislature, that most of the changes and so on are started
two or three years in advance, in what they called PCP, Program Change Proposals. So
we started demanding to meet on any proposed PCP’s. And I was going down with
others as a committee that Art sent down to the chancellor’s office in Long Beach and
demanding to see what PCP’s they were planning over the next two, three years so we
knew well in advance and so on. And it’s just - you know, I think it was - 1 think it was
too bad. I mean in a sense the same people ended up running, for the most part, ended
up running CFA, if they’d been active UPC. But there was a loss of time, there’s a loss
of the - of the labor connection, and some people never did really become active again in
faculty unionism because they were locked out of the election campaign.
Okay, so now we’ve lost - now we’ve lost the election. Okay, so what are we going to
do? Well, there’s two strategies. The inside strategy which is go in and take it over,
which is basically the Kessler strategy, and so most people that were affiliated with
Kessler immediately not only - as I did - join, they start actively campaigning for office
in CFA and so on. Okay. And then there’s the outside strategy. We stay outside and
stay active as UPC, one, because maybe the CFA will just be so lousy and terrible that we
can challenge them and be elected bargaining agent. That began to look extremely
unlikely because we lost half our organization. They’d gone into CFA and they weren’t
doing great, but it was not likely that we were going to be able to mount a credible
challenge to them.
HS: What was Art doing -
PR: Art was outside.
HS: He was outside, okay.
PR: And he was publishing some great broadsheets and - we were attacking CFA and then the
argument came up, well, if we’re not going to be able to run and - and defeat them as
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collective - ask for a recall and challenge them and get enough signatures to challenge
them and ask for another election and beat ‘em in another election, then what’s our role
going to be. And, well, it’s going to be a gadfly role. And then should - can we do that
better from the outside, or shouldn’t we after all go inside and be gadfly’s on the inside
since they - they have the power and we don’t think that we’re going to be able to beat
‘em, then maybe we should be - go in and - and try to run for office and - so forth.
And so we stayed gadfly for quite a while. We put out all faculty mailings, we put out
broadsheets and so forth and so on. But eventually it just seemed like even that we were
losing in numbers. We were paying double dues because most people, even if they
weren’t active in CFA, were members of CFA, and we were losing the financial basis for
maintaining an outside gadfly rule. So we voted to disband.
And here’s all this machinery that we bought during the strike and I’m so proud of.
[Laughing] I mean I’m sure it’s a different mimeograph machine by this time, but we
always had stayed well-equipped after that. So you know - and that was UPC stuff. We
had a mimeograph machine and probably had a Gestifax and electric typewriters and a lot
of stuff of that sort. So what are we going to do with that? And we finally voted - Tim
Sampson recommended some group that he thought highly of in the East Bay and they
came over and I helped ‘em load the mimeograph machine and so on and gave it a pat
and wished it luck at its new home.
So that was - okay, I was just going to say, once we disbanded UPC, I had no objection to
playing an activist role in CFA, and would, in fact, have done so. But family - family
things happened that stopped me from doing this. Also, about the time that this
happened, I was living part-time in Santa Cruz and I got into neighborhood organizing
down there and helped organize a neighborhood association. I was going to most of the
supervisor’s meetings at the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors and Planning
Commission. So I had about a four or five year period there where I was doing
neighborhood organizing.
And then what really wiped me out, my oldest son, this is the son you met, Daniel, my
youngest son Peter, was a student activist. He’d been active at Stanford as a political
science major in building a Hooverville there. And then he went to San Diego as a
graduate student at UC San Diego. This is during the divestment fight, and he was
involved on a statewide level in the student divestment fight. And they had a
demonstration going at UC San Diego that they wanted to keep going through
commencement and - so that people coming on campus for commencement would see the
- this disinvestment demonstration. And the administration said that they couldn’t sleep
on campus ‘cause they were sleeping at the site so the administration couldn’t come in
and dismantle it. So what they did was they went on a sleep deprivation strike and -
using loud music and drugs, they just stayed there and they didn’t sleep.
And my oldest son went crazy. He managed to last through the strike and the
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negotiations and to keep the thing going through commencement. But then after that he
went — and it turned out he was manic-depressive and he went into an extreme manic
episode and he was living as a homeless person on the streets, bouncing around
California, different cities, for about eight months. And then we - he called me on - just
before Christmas and he was kind of between manic and depressive, and I picked him up
some place, Santa Rosa or someplace, we got him on Lithium and it was like a miracle.
And he started to pull himself together. He was on Lithium for seven years.
He got a job. He’s with CISPES’s, Committee in Solidarity with El Salvador. He’s
paid staff for CISPES’s. He was on Lithium. And he went to a national convention of
CISPES’s in connection with one of their campaigns. It was the last thing he was going
to do in CISPES’s and he was going to return to San Diego. He was going to go back
and do his Pd.D. dissertation on CISPES’s as a participant observer, and he shaved his
Lithium medication at the CISPES’s convention. It was back in Massachusetts in the
Berkshire’s, a place he’d never been. And he went crazy again and walked away from
that convention in the Berkshire’s and has never been heard of since. And we mounted a
nationwide search. We got on Connie Chung’s T.V., Face-To-Face. We got an article
in a major journal that goes to all psychiatrists about his case. So whatever organizing
abilities and stuff I had was just - an end to that.
And then my wife had a heart failure and so I just got taken out of it. Except - we got
into a lay-off situation and I was kind of a specialist on avoiding lay-offs because of
rigging the formulas and doing stuff like that. So the CFA asked both Jim Seyfers and
myself from Philosophy to serve on the layoff committee here and I did serve on that
CFA layoff committee. We went in and argued with the administration, showed them
how they could use difference in pay leaves, how there are various devices and gimmicks
that we could use to - to deal with layoff. And that gave me a kind of a go with some of
the CFA people here.
HS: When was this?
PR: I don’t know. It must have been about eight years ago or something like that.
So I want to say just a little bit about the failure of the nine -unit load campaign as a
faculty imposed schedule. I thought it was a great issue and that’s what we were
working on when we got hit at San Francisco State. And in some ways that issue took a
serious hit, too, but we tried to bring it back as an action program. When Art was chair
of UPC, and it was part of a program called The Three FAIRS. And one of the FAIRS
had to do with the lecture situation, getting them on the same kind of pay. And I forget
what the third fare was, but the other was the nine-unit load. And the problem with that
was there was a serious division kind of arising where the lecturers thought that the
Biennan people weren’t supportive enough of lecturers. And the problem with the
three-unit course load was it was something that was subject to direct action and you
could just do it. But the stuff that we needed to do for lecturers and which we have done
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to some extent, was not subject to our control in the same way. We couldn’t just
suddenly start paying the lecturers .25 instead of .20 [more money]. But with respect to
load, it was - you know, the kind of thing you can do in the - you know, you can just do it
on the job. You can just say I’m going to do it this way. It’s in your control and
lecturer issues weren’t. So that the nine -unit load, they were suspicious of it. They
thought well, you people will go and get your nine-unit load, and that’s just going to
exasperate the differences between the full-timers and the lecturers. ‘Cause you’ll have
your nine -unit load and despite the fact that you support better pay for us and medical and
so on, we won’t - we won’t have it. So that was - that was a long-running thing.
My proposal was - 1 forget what year it was - that before what we’ve asked for was that
just people would pledge not to teach one of their four scheduled classes. But we had
gotten the idea during the strike, in connection with the spring semester, that maybe the
thing to do was to have our own schedule rather than have them set the schedule. And
then people looked like they were not doing their job because there’s a class they weren’t
doing, okay. So this time we were going to go in there and we were going to have a
UPC schedule and we were going to tell students - they would have their schedule but we
would have our schedule and we would tell students that if you register for a class that’s
not in our schedule, that class is probably not going to meet. So we thought that we’d
have a double protection. The most at risk for the faculty would be a twenty- five percent
pay cut, it couldn’t be five day, and probably that wasn’t going to happen because
probably the class that they were supposed to be teaching that wasn’t in the UPC
schedule would not have any students in it, you know, so that anybody who wanted to
participate in that, we would schedule them for three classes and we’d do everything
possible to make sure that there weren’t students in the classes, you know. And students
aren’t - they don’t like the idea that this teacher might not be there and so on. So we
thought that might be effective and it lost by about two votes at the state council level,
primarily shut down by lecturers who thought that the lecturer part of the three-FAIR
program just - you know, was not as promising as the - as the full-time. And that’s - so
that’s what happened to that.
One other thing -
HS: Before we go on to that one, basically because of the way departments could set up
the nine-unit system, you know, and to a great measure the way you had initially
touted its possibility way back before the big strike, Bierman says it was basically
gained. I mean as I recall.
PR: Oh -
HS: But you’re saying -
PR: - no reprisals was gained. They didn’t dock our pay in Philosophy twenty-five percent.
So those that had it weren’t - no reprisals were taken against -
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HS: There was no reprisal on it, okay.
PR: - people that had it. But we didn’t gain it for other people.
HS: Okay.
PR: No. We didn’t gain it - we didn’t get it new for anybody.
HS: I see the distinction.
PR: But we had people that were probably going to do it if - if we hadn’t had the strike. If
we’d stayed bread-and-butter the whole year. We were running a campaign to - to have
people pledge that they would only teach three classes in the spring, but that just got - got
swept away.
I retired fully in January. Before that, I took early retirement. And that was something
else that I think I was one of the first people in the system to push for early retirement,
which seemed to be a win-win situation. On early retirement, you teach half-time, but
you start drawing your retirement pay. But you also free up half a position. So it’s
great in lay-off situations. If you could get early retirement packages and layoff. So I
have a history going back almost as long as on the three-course load as making use of
difference of pay leaves, which lets the person take a leave. And then the replacement is
you get as much money as the difference between the Step 1 lecturer and so you can take
a leave and that frees up positions and so on. And also early retirement. So those were
other issues that - kind of the technical kind of issues that I was involved in and pushed.
And that’s something that CFA is - originally, when we got - we got a really good early
retirement system and prior to 1987 or 1988, you could take early retirement as long as
you were healthy, you know. You could take it starting at fifty-five, and you could
continue it as long as you wanted. And for some reason, I’m still not clear about it
because they - 1 am clear about it, but it’s still a win-win situation for the administration
because they get a half of a position that they - is freed by a person taking early
retirement. They can appoint new people and they can appoint ‘em at a lower salary and
so on. But for some reason they started cracking down on that and CFA wasn’t able to
resist ‘em. So now if you take early retirement at sixty-two, you can do it for five years.
If you take it at sixty-three, you can only do it for three years, I think. I took early
retirement at sixty- two. I thought I’d get some benefit for something that I really hustled
for in the system, and that was the last time I could do it and take it for five years. I
retired fully in January, a year ago. But I found for various reasons, I have gone back to
teaching. I’m now teaching as a Step 1 lecturer at San Francisco State. And I am going
to do something. And I’m not quite sure what it is, but [laughing]. Maybe I’ll start
paying more attention to lecturer issues.
HS: [Laughing]
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PR: My daughter - my daughter, Sharon, is going to be teaching at San Francisco State next
year as a lecturer, Step 1, too, teaching English 50. So [laughing] they’re going to have
two Radcliffs in the lecturer ranks at San Francisco State.
HS: You already have a faction to irritate ‘em with.
PR: [Laughing] So, yeah, I think that’s it. The last part goes pretty fast. And - 1 can’t - you
know, Art - sharing an office with Art was extraordinary. I mean he’s really an unusual
person. The number of things that he got going and - it was just a tragedy that when it
came down for all the marbles in California that - that UPC wasn’t creative enough to
find an important role for this person.
HS: Yeah, that’s amazing.
PR: That was - that was too bad.
HS: Yeah. I don’t remember seeing much on that in the oral history - why don’t I
remember seeing too much on that.
PR: Art didn’t say anything about what happened.
HS: I didn’t think so.
PR: That’s a very sore subject. I don’t think he wants to talk about it. He didn’t say much
about - he doesn’t go much beyond the strike, as I remember, in his oral history.
HS: Not as I recall, yeah.
PR: But he was president of the statewide organization. He - it was very hard for staff with
this - going back and forth between Kessler and Bierman. He ended up releasing Bud
Hutchinson who had been staff forever in bringing in new staff for UPC. And he did try
to get a very strong action program going. But, again, although the president vote
changed, it was still a - a divided statewide organization and we weren’t able to get our
action program passed. He did start getting meet and confers on - at the right time, two
or three years in advance when stuff was happening and we can really, you know, get
some input and make clear that certain things were just unacceptable before they were
actually in the budget and enacted. And nobody in UPC before thought about actually
going down there and having quasi negotiating sessions at the chancellor’s office under
the meet and confer provisions.
So he did a lot in that - in that period, but I don’t think there’s sort of anything that - and
that should be part of the record of faculty unionism in California. Sort of what
happened and why there’s a CFA and so on. But I can see why he didn’t perhaps want
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to say much about it.
HS: Yes. Well, I sure appreciate your sitting in for this and doing this.
PR: Oh, yeah, well -
[End of Interview]
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